GT3 RS Ice Grey

A cool gray for a collector's piece

Cool gray finishes only established themselves on sporting Porsches in recent years and quickly found buyers who want neither a loud color nor anonymous silver. On a circuit 911 with a tall wing and huge cutouts in the fenders such a gray looks almost technical: the body then looks like a tool rather than an ornament. The difference against classic silver is that the tone has no metallic sheen and stays flat, so the eye reads the shape by the shadows rather than by reflections.

For a modeler it is at the same time the most rewarding surface for subsequent shading. An icy gray has enough brightness for darker transitions in the panel lines to show on it, while it does not overpower colored accessories such as yellow calipers or red lettering.

Gray as a building foundation

Of the whole palette it is exactly this tone that suits a check coat best. When you go over a model with it before the final color, everything the abrasive paper missed shows up and a mistake can be corrected before expensive paint falls on it. If you use it as a top coat, reckon on the matte and gloss forms looking different once varnished, so make a sample on a plastic card first.

It also comes into its own on interior plastics, on the undersides of cars and on surfaces that are meant to look like bare aluminum without a metallic glitter. In dioramas it then serves for concrete elements, where it is enough to add a little white and the tone shifts to a faded form.

Compared with saturated colors it is undemanding to work with. It covers well after the second pass, does not clog fine lines and takes the addition of further shades straight in the cup, so you can mix a whole range from almost white to mid gray and shade the individual body panels with it.