The Paint Review: Two Thin Coats

Duncan Rhodes, the meme man himself, he of the two thin coats et cetera et cetera; if you move in online hobby circles you will almost certainly have seen his mug in an image macro or three. For years he was one of the stalwart painting presenters/teachers on WarhammerTV’s Youtube channel, along with Emma Durrant (now ElectricEve) and Chris Peach, before striking out on his own under the Duncan Rhodes Painting Academy banner. That brand has grown to include a range of paint with the moniker Two Thin Coats (hereafter referred to as TTC), referencing Mr. Rhodes’ catchphrase from his time at WHTV. 

In fact, that’s what I’m here to talk about today! Welcome back to another Paint Review, I’m keewa, your Pierrot of Pigment, Harlequin of Hue, Scaramouche of Saturation, here to give you my esteemed opinion on the worthiness of these thin coats. Will they keep you warm in winter, or shall you shiver (because you’ve spent all your money on paint)? Read on, my dear dauber!

With thanks to the people over at Duncan Rhodes Painting Academy and Transatlantis Games for providing me with the Two Thin Coats Core Set, comprising a selection of paints from both Wave 1 and Wave 2 of the TTC Kickstarter.

The website blurb boasts that the TTC paints are “developed from the ground up with some of the best paint development chemists in the world;” now, I can’t attest to the qualifications of the chemists who developed the paints, but I can at least talk about how they feel to use as a jobbing painter.

Opacity 

Colour opacity chart methodology – I got a good amount of each paint on the brush (Artis Opus S size 5), straight out of the bottle, and drew it across the dark strips I printed on the piece of paper with a single stroke, before scanning the sheet as you see here. This is a pretty normal industry test for how opaque coatings are, adapted for this situation.

As you can see from the chart, the opacity is actually very very good across the board. There are some small “gaps” where the black strip is visible, but these are all isolated to colours where you would absolutely expect that to be the case (yellows, oranges, whites, magentas). Now, obviously you are not going to be using this paint directly out of the bottle, as the name implies – it’s generally a bit too thick for that and you’ll get brushstrokes, but what this test does show is that the pigmentation is dense and opaque, you aren’t going to be spending a ton of time adding layer after layer to get your basecoat opacity, even the metallics have strong coverage, which is often not the case.

Opacity: Exceptional

Variety

With 120 paints in the current line, TTC aren’t going to be troubling Reaper or Vallejo in terms of sheer variety any time soon, but it’s still a very solid offering, comprising a fairly usual spread of regular acrylics, metallics, and washes. There aren’t really any notable gaps in the TTC range from a colour standpoint, most hues are represented here and any that aren’t can easily be mixed from what’s available, so no worries there. The skin-tone offering is also reasonably diverse with three distinct colour triads for different ethnicities (caucasian, olive-skinned, and dark skinned). 

One interesting inclusion comes in the form of six “brights”, paints which clearly aim to tap into the space left by the dearly-departed Citadel Edge paints (which just became layer paints). These super bright paints manage to avoid becoming too desaturated and pastel on the way to becoming bright, which is normally a real pitfall of final edge-highlighting paints (Army Painter Fanatic springs to mind..).

TTC paints are arranged into a simulacrum of the Triad System that GW touted some years ago, with a base (in this case, Shadow), middle tone, and highlight – printed on the bottle so that new painters or painters who aren’t quite confident enough to go nuts can confidently choose their palette in the knowledge that these colours Definitely Work Together. They’re certainly not the only paint manufacturer to use Triads, both Reaper and Army Painter have been using triad-based paint systems for a good while now, TTC is a simple addition to this pedigree. One slight niggle in the TTC triad system is that it doesn’t say what the “other” paints in the triad are, or give a “family” name – both of which Army Painter does with its Fanatic and Air ranges, so without reference to the box you might not know that Ivory Tusk actually goes with Griffon Claw rather than Dragon Fang. The paint names are… fine. Some of them are not very descriptive (Amethyst Rayne? What is that supposed to mean? Call it Dark Purple, please!) but by and large most of them do at least include a colour in their name, which is more than can be said for some manufacturers. *cough* GW *cough* 

Variety: Very Good.

Smoothness

As the name and the meme suggest, you’ll want to thin these paints down before you apply them to your model as they’re quite thick out of the bottle, very much in the vein of Citadel’s consistency, but perhaps slightly more flowy. Even so they remain very consistent in their general viscosity, which is very helpful when doing things like wet blending. They dry quite smoothly after application, with a nice even matt surface.

Smoothness: Very Good

Pigmentation

TTC boasts that their paints are Highly Pigmented, and by-and-large that seems to be the case across the range that I tested – colours are quite saturated and well consistent, again much like Citadel paints, from where they draw so much of their inspiration. There’s not much to write home about here; I will say though that the metallics I was sent split very badly and took an eye-watering amount of shaking in order to get them to come together and actually work, all the flakes of what I assume is Mica(?) had clumped at the bottom of the bottle and would not budge without some serious exercise. If you’re serious about these paints you might want to grab yourself a nail polish bottle mixer off Amazon to save some paint. The black wash also dried very glossy, which I found quite disappointing.

Pigmentation: Non-Metallics Very Good, Metallics Good

Packaging

Oh dear, oh dear. The perfect dropper bottle may not exist, but these are Bad with a capital B, bad like a Michael Jackson song, bad like the company in the song Bad Company by the band Bad Company on the album Bad Company. Other dropper bottles clog and you have to fettle the nozzle with a needle or toothpick in order to get them moving again, but it’s a special trick to have a bottle with a pre-installed agitator that is, apparently, the perfect size to get into the bottle of the nozzle and wodge itself in there like a plug. I shake my bottles up and down, like a normal person, and so perhaps eight times out of ten, the agitator would get stuck in the neck of the bottle, requiring me to violently jerk the bottle upwards or slam the bottom onto the desk top to shake it loose and get the paint out. Now maybe you are thinking to yourself “Keewa, why don’t you just shake these bottles from side to side instead of up and down?” to which my response is “that’s crazy, what are you talking about? I’m not going to sit at my desk and remind myself, oh for these paints you need to twirl the bottle like a baton otherwise it won’t work when you try to put some on your palette, be serious!” 

Packaging: Terrible, Disaster

Value

These are not cheap paints; they are actually very expensive paints. Following the metric I use for all these things (price per litre – obviously no-one is buying a litre of these things but since different brands have differently sized bottles it’s easier to just divide the price by the number of millilitres and multiply by 1000 for the sake of readability) these top out the chart, tying with Citadel Contrast for the Most Expensive Paint (per litre) on the market. A bottle of Duncan will set you back £3.95/4,50 €/$5, which is 52% more than a bottle of Vallejo Game Color (which, critically, also contains 20% more paint).

Value: Eye-Wateringly Expensive

Conclusion

As a reviewer I find myself in a bit of a strange situation – on the one hand it’s my job to tell you whether a product is good or not, but it’s also my job to tell you whether I believe you should buy a product or not. Ordinarily those two briefs line up pretty closely, typically a good product is one you would be well advised to buy, but not this time. The Duncan paints are decent, pretty good even, but somehow I find that I cannot recommend them. Why not? Well, they are incredibly expensive, asking the customer to fork over an amount that I do not believe they merit. I recently reviewed the paints from TTCombat, in terms of price by volume they are all the way down at the other end of the scale, and in terms of quality they are solid and dependable. The Duncan paints, too, are solid and dependable, but they are 172% of the price of the TTCombat range. Are they 72% better? Absolutely, unequivocally not. 

The Duncan paints work just fine, and are capable of great results – but to me the price is unconscionable. Now, to be clear, as a reviewer I’m in the privileged position of receiving these paints for free from the manufacturer, but if I had bought them from a shop I know that I would have ended up feeling in my heart like it had all been a bit of a swizz. Plus the bottles are absolutely dire, just dreadful.

If money is no object, yeah, these paints are solid and you’ll probably enjoy using them, but if you’re on any kind of budget at all I’d advise you to look elsewhere, there are other brands that are basically as good as TTC and offer significantly better value for money.

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