Introduction

LifeColor created another diorama set, Stone Grey. This set is item CS 40 and contains six plastic 22ml jars. It was kindly provided for review by Airbrushes.com, which narrates on their site:

Water soluble acrylic colours for modelling and hobby. LifeColor is excellent for paint brushing or airbrushing on plastic, resin, metal, vinyl, wood, cloth and ceramic.

Rendering authentic natural surfaces is one of my modeling and artistic pursuits and this set will be very helpful. These paints can be used on buildings and groundwork on your layouts and dioramas.

Examples of colorful stone can be found via Click here for additional images for this review at the bottom of this review.

Stone Grey Diorama Set

'Don't fix it if it ain't broken' is sagaciously followed by LifeColor as they continue to issues sets of six 22ml screw top bottles, packed in a good looking flip-top box. Multilingual text on the back of the box explains how to use these paints.

The bottle caps continue to be molded with an internal rim which both provides a small palette cup as well as inhibits paint fouling of the bottle cap thread.

I found that these water soluble acrylic paints are made with very fine ground pigments. They are advertised for use on plastic, resin, metal, vinyl, wood, cloth and ceramic. To date, I can attest to all but vinyl. (Application to cloth - a shirt - was not intended.) They have no noticeable odor. I find them to be much thinner than other brands I use, more like a thick wash than a paint. Formulation leans towards airbrushing although brushing works well, too. One-pass brushing did not completely cover the test chips but it is very close. One-pass brushing did cover well on hard foam.

There are no instructions other than examples printed on the box. This set lacks the graphics demonstrating application techniques. Lifecolor reminds us that these can be mixed with their Tensocrom Medium to create washes and glazes.

LifeColor Stone Grey set includes:

UA 780 Blue Stone
UA 781 Brown Stone
UA 782 Dark Sand Stone
UA 783 Green Stone
UA 784 Reddish Stone
UA 785 Light Stone

The six hues span a good range of rocky colors.

Application

I airbrushed and paint brushed each color. None of the colors ran nor puddled. They dry as advertised: lusterless.

Airbrushing
After shaking each jar 20 times, I drew paint and put it into my airbrush color cup. I did not thin any of the paints and all sprayed flawlessly through a medium tip at 12-15 psi.

Bristle Brushing...
...is somewhat different. As noted above these are much thinner than conventional paints. Applied to the satin back of each color chip, only one color mostly covered with one pass. But we don't buy these paints to paint cardstock chips, and the paint worked great over a hard foam cottage.

To demonstrate this set I painted a hard foam cottage by Ziterdes. Application was by good acrylic brushes.

Adhesion

Like many previously tested LifeColors, these stick to the surface and resist scratching away.

Conclusion

LifeColor Stone Grey is another versatile set to simulate stone, whether upon the ground, outcroppings, or structures. The colors match hues I see on structures and exposed cliffs locally.

Whether applied with airbrush or bristle brush these paints provide realistic colors with good consistency. They mix together easily affording a modeler virtually an endless range of colors. Certainly they can be mixed with other LifeColor colors and pigments for even more effects.

I do not have anything meaningful to complain about and happily recommend this set.

Thanks to Airbrushes.com for providing this set. Please remember to mention to them and LifeColor that you saw this paint set here - on Armorama.