Paints – Two Thin Coats

With the second round of Two Thin Coats Kickstarter out, I figured it was (finally) time to scurry and give my thoughts on this range. Granted the original Kickstarter was late, but I have had these paints for a few months now. Which should have been enough time to write up something about it, but you know life, work, etc. Plus I’m not getting paid for this, so I take my own sweet time on these things.

Two Thin Coats

Two Thin Coats is a new player in town from Duncan Rhodes. I’ve never met Duncan, but he seems like a nice guy and I definitely benefitted from a lot of the YouTube tutorials he put out when he was with Games Workshop and later in his own Painting Academy. When I heard he was putting out a paint line, like many people, I was intrigued! Especially since it was dubbed “Two Thin Coats”. Could there possibly be a yellow that covers in two thin coats?! Haha, read on…

Pros:
Kickstarter Package
Triads
Dropper Bottles
Coverage

I’ll start off with the Kickstarter. Delivery took way longer than expected, but I was still interested to try out the line when it came. The package was pretty nice, with nice instructional graphics, stickers, a triad chart, etc. So there’s a bonus there.

The paints comes in triads, which makes it nice and easy to paint with and remember the order of colors. A plus for me, at least. Similar problem arose as with other triads, some of the shades of colors are not far enough apart. You might have to give them some “oomph!” to get better contrast.

Dropper bottles. Also a huge preference of mine when painting. IF these had come out 8 years ago, I would have probably shoved all my Citadel paints off the desk and into the trash right away!

Coverage is pretty high. Though you’re not going to be covering grey primer with Two Thin Coats of yellow. Maybe someday someone will invent a magical paint that does that, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. The Shade paint “Dark Sun Yellow” does act much like Citadel’s Averland Sunset (or any other Yellow Ochre) to lay down a foundation to paint brighter yellows over.

Cons:
Dropper Bottles
Color Range
Cost
Consistency
Metals
Paint line

Wait, didn’t you say the Dropper bottles were good?! Yea, but these ones I’m not a fan of. First off the bottle caps are conical (to match the nips), so you can’t really paint the top of the bottle like I’m used to doing with other bottles. The conical nips of the bottles are ‘ok’. Supposedly it makes it so you can control the drops of paint from the bottle. I found I got just as much paint on the palette as any other dropper bottle. Clogging still happened on occasion as paint dried in the nip. Though the nips are much easier to clean out than Reaper’s. The bottles themselves are a tougher plastic, so I find myself having to exert some real pressure to get paint out at times, which is really annoying. One last thing…the bottle caps will twist snug, but then I found out they have an extra turn to get them all the way tight. Plus and minus there…the plus is once you know you’ve turned them all the way, they are tight! But I imagine a number of people might not realize there is another whole turn to get there.

Limited color range – kind of to be expected with a first run and the second Kickstarter is expanding the range.

Cost – I’m too lazy to do the math today, but I think most have said that price/ml, this is the most expensive range out there. Though I’d be surprised if they were more than Wargames Foundry.

Consistency – overall pretty good, though I only have 15 colors from the range (I used 14 of them on the mini below). So I can’t attest to all their paints, but I did get a decent representation and I made sure to buy yellow and orange which can be troublesome. Out of the paints I have, I’d say they were much more consistent than Citadel’s. I did experience some tearing, which I’ll talk about in the Mini painting section below.

Metals – so a lot of people go gaga over their metal paints. Honestly I find their metal line to not be that much different than Citadels. I can’t imagine anyone who has actually tried Vallejo Metal Colors, Vallejo Model Air metals, or AK’s metals to find the 2TC line superior. And speaking of which…

Paint line – What I found most surprising with this paint line is that they work almost identically to Citadel paints. Yes, Citadel paints are a well known line. Yes, Duncan probably used a lot of Citadel paints while working at GW. But there are other, much better paints out there and it really boggles my mind. I almost feel like whomever came up with this paint line has been in their basement with their Citadel paints for the last fifteen years and failed to notice what’s come out since. I mean, they should have at least been familiar with Vallejo. I guess they were familiar enough to go with a dropper bottle design, but still. And that’s my little rant, which makes me feel like it’s time to wrap this up…

Overview

If you like Citadel paints, you will find Two Thin Coats to be a more consistent line of paint. Is it worth the cost to completely switch over though? I’m not sure. You’re getting a slightly better and consistent paint, but the small bottle size and cost might put some people off. Personally, I think there are better paint lines out there than Citadel, so I think I would point people to AK or Reaper or Vallejo. But we like what we like, and pretty much any paint can be used to paint a mini quite nicely. Also, painters tend to have different preferences. Some like to work with airbrushes or glazes and find really thin paints to be awesome. Others might prefer thick paints for their coverage. I find myself somewhere in-between, leaning towards thinner paints due to their versatility, but still liking my paints to be opaque enough for quick coverage.

While I haven’t spent years with these paints like I have with some other brands, I’ve had enough time to decide I won’t be buying into the second Kickstarter. Not because they are horrible paints, but because my style of painting has significantly changed to where I would not find these paints to be as fun to work with. So it’s up to you to decide whether these match your painting style or no. Anyways, that’s my two cents. It’s certainly not the glowing review that I see popping up all over the place, but I find it’s best to be skeptical when your wallet is concerned.

The Mini.

This is another Urban Mammoth metal mini from the Militia Females w/Pistols set. Which I bought when I was looking for some extra Necromunda minis. Painted up using the limited range of Two Thin Coats paints I had (14 paints on this one). The base and ground texture were painted with other paints.

So the first thing I’ll note is that I didn’t have black, white, cream, or even two colors to make a really good chromatic black. Her hair was a mix of purple and yellow, which would normally make a chromatic black, but ended up being brown. It was good enough, so I went with that and added a wash.

Ah, on the pic above…I painted the lower part of the shirt as semi-translucent. Kinda worked.

I had two washes “Flesh Wash” and “Battle Mud Was” (aka Agrax). They were ok. Given the bottle size is the same as the paint bottles (small), they would have to be amazing to get me to run out and buy them. I used a thinned flesh wash over the skin, hoping it would tie the colors together more. Can’t say it did much, but most of the model has very smooth surfaces. I used the Battle Mud wash over the hair and on the gun. It really helped me out with the gun, because before that it was just two bright silvery metals. Afterwards the gun looked kinda goldish, and not having a black paint…I gladly went with that!

Moral of the story, I should at least buy a black, white, and ivory or cream if I ever plan to paint a mini all in one brand in the future! Since I already have those colors in other lines, it just seems silly to have so many blacks and white. I guess an ivory for highlights and two colors to make a reliable chromatic black would probably be better.

Most of the painting went pretty well. The yellow triad covered over grey with not too many coats. Though the paint was a little gritty, so my preference would be to use other brands. Where it really went wrong was on the mini skirt. I decided to wet blend some highlights in with orange and yellow. In seconds the paint started to tear, which might be hard to see in the shot above. It was lame and there isn’t much you can do about it afterwards. I guess if you’re trying to wet blend with them, a drying retarder is a good choice. I also wasn’t too crazy about the Flesh tone triad. I guess if you only have one triad, the ‘medium range’ is the way to go. Without a good color for highlights though, I was pretty stuck.

Overall, very similar to using Citadel paints but it a bit easier. With Citadel I find that I have to remember the idiosyncrasies of each color, but these colors functioned pretty much identical other than the yellow being more gritty. The washes were nothing special. The metals, though better than Citadels, don’t hold a candle to Vallejo’s Metal and Metal Air.

The mini was a simple one, and actually much needed after I spent so much time on another mini (should be next week). I can’t say she’s the best model I ever painted, but she turned out okay for what I had to work with. She can easily be used for modern games, Stargrave, and other SciFi stuff.

Oh yea, I don’t know who (if anyone) runs a Fembruary challenge, but this would be my entry. It might even have been the first Fembruary mini I’ve painted. Painting more female minis is high on my list this year, to provide more options for games with my daughter. Also, this reminds me that I haven’t been tagging these minis for Dave’s Paint What You Got Challenge, so I better go back and do that!

Next Up: Like a Prayer.

• Miniature Painting
• SciFi/Modern Minis
• stargrave