Painting faces

I am starting to paint the faces of the puppets. The first thing is to cover the plain brown heads with a base coat of white. I have always used normal domestic white matt emulsion paint for this, which is not only cheap, but does the job.

However I thought I might try acrylic artist paint. This was to see if it was quicker between coats as acrylic dries very fast. It was not a good idea though. Acrylic holds brush stroke lines very visibly, which on a small puppet is a problem. It is also quite rubbery, and so the lines cannot be sanded down effectively between coats.