The Paint Review - Two Thin Coats: The Dark Arts

Grimdark continues its inexorable rise and continued moment in the grimy, black sun, and we're seeing more and more companies start to provide paints and paint sets tailored to a distinctly grim, dark, blanchitsu-and-zorn style. Coming in after a hugely successful Kickstarter in late 2025, Two Thin Coats Paints and the Duncan Rhodes Painting Academy have released the Dark Arts set, 30 brand new colours designed to provide everything you need for grimdark painting. We've dug into them for review, so let's get going!

Thanks to the Two Thin Coats team for sending this out for review.

I love painting in a grimdark style both in colour choice and techniques, but I'm not at all picky with my paints, using anything I have to hand no matter how gloopy or dry. Recently though I’ve found this very frustrating - different brands might not work well together, or require a lot of grey mixing to match tones, or even are just overall too bright/too watery/too thick. Nevertheless, I paint grim and dark or adjacent for just about everything - I use a limited palette of whatever colours and brands I can find at the point I need them. There are a few different target audiences for this set, and I’m definitely one of them and I was excited to try out top of the line paints in a curated set. So, while I don’t have paint review master Keewa’s level of knowledge about what colours are and how they work, I am a big fan of brown, orange, cream and black. Hopefully that’s enough!

The paints arrive in a very attractive storage/display box and a less chaotic painter would probably keep them organised in there!

What You Get

The Dark Arts set contains a stonking 30 paints covering just about everything you could possibly need for painting in a grimdark style. That breaks down to 6 inks, three metallics and 21 standard paints, mostly brand new for this set. It's a sizable collection that (spoiler for the overall conclusion for this review) will almost completely replace my current paint range, and all within a stylish presentation box for handy transport and storage.

Everything here is based around what you might call a classic grimdark palette, with lots of red, ochre, grey and green. The Zorn colours are all present and correct, with Diablo Red, Cherubic White, Pustule Ochre and Animus Black forming a very close acrylic take on Cadmium Red, Black, Titanium White and Ochre. With those forming the core colours, the rest of the acrylics in the set hit key parts of Zorn and add in the blue and green tones that are tough to mix with acrylic black. Across the 21 acrylic colours you have pretty much everything that you might want to use to paint with the Zorn palette and - handily - can do so without inconsistent mixing, making this a very good set to step into working with a restricted palette without having to make a colour chart or learn colour theory.

Grim Dark Space weirdo, with Dark Arts paint. Credit: Lenoon

That's important because I think it captures what this set is all about. It's absolutely for acrylic painters who know what they're doing in an 'eavy metal (and of course, Duncan Rhodes) inspired style who want to try out something new using their acrylic painting expertise. In providing the full zorn range in high quality paint it's a good onboarding for experienced painters who want to play in this space, without having to learn oils or eyeball all their mixes. That's a useful niche to fill, and supports buying these as a full set.

That's not to say you can't use these paints for mixing up your own colours - and you should! - and they're well made for it, particularly with the inclusion of nice hard whites (Cherubic white and white ink) which will let you play with tone and shade easily.

With 30 colours, the set isn't limited at all, for all that the set includes several whites, a couple of ochres and a lot of reds and oranges. You can, with a bit of mixing and thinking, produce just about anything out of this set. It'll take a little confidence and experimentation, but everything (with one exception) in this article was painted with only the paints in this set, and I think I got a good range of colours out of it.

The exception was gloss varnish - which does make me think of the sole missing bit of the grimdark toolkit in the dark arts set, and that's texture. There's no texture or effects paint here, though the inks do good work for blood effects. I'm not surprised that the masters of painting via multiple smooth thin coats haven't included a bottle of gritty, sticky gloop to texture models during the painting process, and that's fine! Just something to add if you want to get going with grimdark painting.

Bloody Good Paints

So that's what's in the set, but none of it matters if the paint is crap. Luckily for the length - and tone - of this review the paints in this set are high quality and bloody nice. There's a number of really serious advantages to this set over other paint ranges:

Appropriately thinned for out of the bottle mini painting (like milk, as you'd expect from Two Thin Coats!)
Highly pigmented, with very strong colours no matter how close to black/grey/white they are.
A wide range of colours in a restricted set of tones - these are muted, earthlike and subtly greyed tones that work well in painting grimdark straight out of the bottle.
Very fine dropper bottles with agitators, allowing you good control of applying paint to palette.
High quality metallics with excellent coverage.
Punchy, strong and impactful inks with a genuinely ludicrous level of pigment.

A lot of these points are found in other ranges - all to the good there - but it's not that common that they're all found in the same one, especially in one aimed specifically at a given painting style.

The inks and metallics deserve a bit of extra attention. Metallics don't tend to be aimed directly at grimdark styles, so you find yourself having to wash, shade and otherwise fuss with metallic paints to pull them into the aesthetic, and that can present difficulties. While I think you need a bright silver for extreme highlights to pull off really grim textures, I love the three metallic paints in this set for a really grimy, dirty look to metals. I enjoyed them enough to paint one of my test weirdoes entirely in metallics, which was great fun and showed the range you can get out of this set with only three paints.

Just the metallics (and ink for glow effects). Dark Arts Paint. Credit: Lenoon

Painting with Inks isn't something I'm particularly adept at - in fact I had to ask Goonhammer's resident paint expert Keewa "what are inks even for". I started off by trying the White Ink as a base for glow effects, as recommended, and it's a perfect strong free flowing ink for that kind of work, though the usual recommend of buying a ton of artists white ink at a low cost is probably still a better bet. The coloured inks though are fantastic, incredibly rich colours with depth and body to them (this sounds like a wine review) that have already added a lot to my painting. I've even tried out painting with nothing but inks, dropping them directly onto an undercoated model and letting them mix and swirl on their own account - it's turned into a really effective example of how tight these inks are to the classic grimdark colour scheme, as well as turned out a really good model!

Trench Crusade Weirdo, with Dark Arts ink.

What They're Good For

Grimdark by an artist - these are high quality paints that expect you to blend, mix and understand the palette BUT they provide enough colours that you can, if you want, take everything straight out of the pot. The quality of the paint in terms of pigmentation and coverage is excellent, a straight upgrade to my hodge-podge of different brands and manufacturers I've been using up until now. For aspiring grimdark painters this is a one stop shop to get started - and get started well - with everything you need right away. If you're already very into grimdark painting you'll find this an excellent toolbox that will give you a lot of new colours that are tricky to mix that you're probably in need of - particularly with the greens, greys, and inks.

The idea of a really comprehensive grimdark set might be a bit of a contradiction in terms, given that if you're feeling very adventurous you can pull off grimdark with 4 or 5 paints and some sand, but as a base for imaginative painting, having everything right there has a power all of it's own - I found myself more able and willing to experiment with colour schemes when I had a range of on theme paints to choose from.

If you're not too interested in grimdark painting, this is still a good set! I realised early on that the colours - and the slightly muted tone of the paints - would work very well for historicals painting. There's enough here to pull off 8th army paintschemes for WW2, relying on a lot of ochre, grey and muted green to cover all your bases and even try out a good go at Mountbatten Pink.

Vickers Mark 2 Medium, painted with Dark Arts paints

Given that there was also a good chunk of grey-green in the set, I also wanted to try out a Feldgrau - a bloody difficult but hugely varied range of colours for German and other national uniforms. Using the majority of the Green paints, I think I managed a good go at a version of it to finish off another Nazi Zombie, and used the red and brown inks to mix up blood effects. You could mix in more grey and brown uniforms quite easily, making this a surprisingly excellent set for WW2 painting, and I'm sure historicals-pilled Duncan Rhodes is happy with that!

A Nazi Zombie, with Dark Arts paints

Final Thoughts

This is a premium paint line expanding into weird, dark and grim painting and I think that's a very exciting thing. If you want to experiment in this space with acrylics designed for it, or you want to cut some of the corners out of mixing and blending your own grimdark palette, this is absolutely a set to pick up. The added bonus of it being really good for quite a few WW2 paint schemes is the cherry on top for me personally! In terms of the various premium paint brands, it's also a good deal as a whole set - retailing at around £100 (or regional currency equivalent), I'd definitely recommend doing so over buying individual paints. This really is everything you need and, as my mish-mash of other paints runs dry, will, I think, become just about all I use to paint with. I'm really impressed with the choices made around colours and types of paint in the set, and I'm looking forward to knuckling down to create the weirdest and most wonderful paint jobs I can with it.

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Tags: blanchitsu | grimdark | paint review | zorn