M o d e l W a r s h i p s . c o m Paints Review

Lifecolor Royal Navy WWII
Set #1 & 2 Naval Paints Review

Reviewed September 2018
by Devin Poore

The review samples:
Lifecolor have released several sets of navy-specific paints in recent years. I was sent two RN sets to test. Here’s what I received:

Royal Navy WWII Eastern Approach “Early War” Set 1:
Admiralty Dark Grey 507a
Admiralty Medium Grey 507b
Admiralty Light Grey 507c
Light Grey B20
Medium Green-Grey MS3
Dark Blue-Grey B5

Royal Navy WWII Western Approach “Late War” Set 2:
Hull Red
W.A. Blue
W.A. Green
White
Semtex Green
Corticene

What they are:

Life Color paints are an acrylic paint. The closest contemporary I can come up with is the Vallejo Model Air line. They have very low odor, with just the slightest scent of ammonia.

How they perform:

For my test, I sprayed several samples with a Grex airbrush, shooting around 30psi and 10psi, onto a sheet of styrene primed with Badger’s Stynylrez acrylic white primer.

These paints need no thinning before airbrushing. They flow easily, no spitting, and dry evenly. Humidity was very high the day I sprayed these, and the drying time was slow as a result. Within 10 minutes, however, they’d dried to an even matt finish, and were ready to handle within 30 minutes.

Brush painting works, but as the paints work well out of the bottle in the airbrush, they are a bit thin on the bristles. Two or three thin coats give a nice opaque finish. In the included photos, there are two samples of color for the 507B and the B-5; the squares are airbrushed, while the narrower samples are two coats brush-painted.

Adhesion is great over the primer. After a dry time of 3 hours I stuck a strip of Tamiya masking tape across the color samples – really pressed it in with a lot of pressure -- let it set 5 minutes, then ripped it off like a Band-Aid. No paint pulled from the plastic.

Airbrush and bristle brush clean-up was easily done with the Vallejo/Medea/Simple Green cleaners that I have on hand for acrylics. No problems encountered.

How they match:

NOTE: You are looking at photos on a computer screen. They are not going to look like what you get on a model. I have a color corrected monitor setup that I work with, and they’re still not exactly right. Also, the Snyder and Short paint chips used are hand-painted and have a different texture and sheen than the Lifecolor samples .

I color compared only 4 bottles, because I only had the Snyder and Short Royal Navy WWII ship set – and I had to borrow even that – and because I’ve found through testing paints like these from other manufacturers that you get a good feeling of how everything’s going to match-up based upon any 3 or 4 random bottles.

So, how do they match? Pretty well, actually. Accounting for difference in sheen and texture between the paints and the S&S sample chips, the Western Approaches Green, Corticene and B-5 are nearly spot-on. They are possibly a little on the light side, but that’s fine, and even preferred, for models. The only color that had any visible discrepancy was the 507B, which was off in hue only slightly, the S&S chip having a slight tinge of green that the Lifecolor sample lacks.

Verdict

I work as a model maker for my day-job, for which we sometimes use Lifecolor, so I wasn’t surprised by any of the brush painting or airbrushing results. These paints are very easy to use and give great results. The colors are either spot-on or close enough. They work wonderfully out of the bottle for airbrushing. For minor touch-ups, you can definitely brush paint them, but if you’re looking to brush paint an entire model, you’re going to have to be patient and plan on several coats to get full coverage.

Based upon the performance and the close matches with the Snyder and Short paint chips, I’m looking forward to picking up their US Navy WWII sets for my own use.

Overall, highly recommended. Thanks to Airbrushes.com for the review samples. They carry the entire Life Color line of paints.