I waas very kindly sent a selection of Duncan Rhodes’ new(ish) paint range Two Thin Coats, from UK supplier Exit 23 games. They’re currently running a promotion on these where if you buy any 6 paints from Two Thin Coats or Turbo Dork you get the cheapest paint free, by the way. If you’d like to try them out yourself, please give my affiliate link a follow here! That said, they sent me these for free to try out, so I took to Twitch to give my live reactions to these paints. This isn’t a full range review, these impressions are based purely on my Twitch stream today (go back and watch the VOD if you can!)
Firstly, I received a total of 10 of these 15ml pots – Dragons Gold, and three colour triads: Green (comprising Wyvern Green, Emerald Green, and Ethereal Green), Yellow (Dark Sun Yellow, Skulker Yellow, and Yellow Flame), and Red (Berseker Red, Sanguine Scarlet, and Demon Red).
Whilst having a nice chat with the viewers, my first point was to test the coverage of the “base” versions of each triad on a test model. Above you can see Berserker Red, Dark Sun Yellow, and Wyvern Green. The Red covered excellently in 2 coats and is a deep maroon colour that reminds me of the old Mechrite Red from Citadel’s Foundation line. The yellow is very much like Averland Sunset from the current Citadel line with very similar coverage. This took 3-4 thin coats to get a smooth finish over the grey basecoat. As with all yellow paints, you’re probably best using it over white to get a strong bright finish. The green took 3 thin coats to get a nice even finish. This strongly resembles Caliban Green from Citadel and would be a great base colour for Dark Angels. The red and yellow paints both had a very flat, matte finish. The green has slightly more satin finish to my eyes which you can see from the brighter light reflections.
Overall, these were strong base colours with a subtle saturation rather than being super bright. The Red is certainly closer to Khorne Red than something like Mephiston Red.
Next I started picking out areas on each model with the two lighter tones of each colour. You can see each labelled in the image above. The yellows as expected took a few layers again to get a smooth solid colour, but hold up favourably compared to those in the Citadel line.
The mid red is similar to Mephiston Red, but slightly darker. Demon Red is very similar to Evil Sunz Scarlet, and brings to mind the 90s Blood Angels orange-red armour. I liked this colour a lot.
Emerald Green and Ethereal Green are roughly equivalent to Warpstone Glow and Moot Green from Citadel. The coverage on Ethereal Green did feel slightly better than Moot Green though. I think this would be an excellent triad to replac the citadel trio for Dark Angels if you wanted to change things up.
I used the Dragon’s Gold upon the weapon of the Red warrior, with Retributor Armour from Citadel on the Yellow warrior. These two colours are extremely close – you’d struggle to tell them apart. I do think the Dragons Gold is smoother though, and had a more even colour after a single coat. I think it may well replace Retributor Armour for me just for ease of use.
This is very much still early impressions so I will be integrating these into my paint flow long term to see how I get on with them. Stay tuned to my Twitch streams to keep up to date and see me using them live!
I do however have one nitpick with these paints, despite the colours being excellent, and that’s with the dropper bottles. They do seem to be a little on the leaky side, with some of them having noticable outspillage even upon first use (see the Demon Red on the right of this image). So I’d recommend having a tissue on standby to wipe the caps if you have this particular issue.
On the plus side, each pot contains 15ml which is 3ml more than the usual Citadel paint pot, and it feels/sounds like each also has a mixing ball inside so they are easy and quick to shake and get ready to use.
I had a great time trying these paints out today and certainly would like to pick up some more of the colour triads in the near future. Thanks once again to Exit 23 Games for being absolute legends and providing me with these to try out.
