Since online miniature painter Duncan 'Two Thin Coats' Rhodes left Games Workshop, he and colleagues have founded an online painting academy and launched an entire custom paint range. But, in a live video AMA in Wargamer's Discord (which you can listen to in full below) Rhodes tells us the one thing he really wishes he'd still been at GW for: the rebirth of Warhammer The Old World.
Buoyed by years of record profits, Games Workshop has launched several new games and model lines in the time since Rhodes left the company in 2019. But it's The Old World he'd really like to have been on the team for.
"My favorite wargame has been Warhammer Fantasy," Rhodes told our live audience in the Wargamer Discord community. "It wasn't at first, when I first started doing this. I was like 'why would you want bows and arrows when you can have Space Marines with bolters', but Fantasy really grew on me."
"I loved the Bretonnians and I got a bit of a reputation for it in the studio."
After four years teaching fans to paint in person as a retail assistant at the GW store in Derby, in the North of England, Rhodes joined the hobby team as an army painter in 2009, happily painting anything and everything for White Dwarf magazine, various different Warhammer 40k codex books, and other GW publications. Rhodes' particular love affair with Bretonnia was well known, though, with his army on show in the office's display cabinets.
He tells us he was even invited to join an initial pitch meeting for Bretonnia's never-to-be-published 8th edition army book, listening in on "the discussion about where they were going to take the new units".
Rhodes firmly clarifies that he definitely wasn't the one making any decisions, mind. "I was there as the fanboy role, basically, to say, like, 'I think this would be cool!' and they'd say 'there there, that's nice'".
"It was to just give a bit of an influence as to what the audience might think."
But when Games Workshop's 'End Times' storyline nixed Warhammer Fantasy Battle to make way for Age of Sigmar in 2015, Rhodes' ranks of beloved fantasy frenchmen started to attract funny looks. Colleagues saw him painting his barded knights and peasant archers, and asked "why are you doing those, they're not really Warhammer, are they?"
"The political wind was that you're not really on board unless you're fully in with the new thing and you're not into the old thing," he says. "That was like a whiplash thing that really caught me out, I wasn't happy about that."
Though Rhodes reminds us he never had any high level secret insights, he says he did predict the original Warhammer tabletop wargame would return, even as the End Times were bringing it to a somewhat controversial close. "I distinctly remember being in Adepticon doing a seminar", he recalls, "and I said, I bet you the Old World's going to come back in some way, probably done by Forge World, in about ten years.
"As it turns out, it took five." The first announcement of Warhammer: The Old World was in 2019, just a little after Rhodes' departure from Games Workshop. When GW eventually revealed its big shiny launch boxes in 2023, one of the two starring factions for the game's return was - of course - the Kingdom of Bretonnia. Rhodes was shook.
"When they announced Bretonnians were going to be the flagship faction, along with Tomb Kings, I was like 'what is this world?'
"I can remember being told 'you shouldn't be so enthusiastic about Bretonnians because they're not really on message any more'… and a few years later Warhammer Community is showing Bretonnians everywhere with brand new artwork!" he tells us. "It's such a bizarre thing."
"So I would have loved being behind the scenes to see that again," he says.
"And I'd also love to talk to some of the people developing it, to understand why their direction for the Bretonnians is the total opposite direction from where the Citadel Studio was going to take it," Rhodes adds, with his customary jovial air and just a hint of highly relatable nerdy curiosity.
In particular, he's dying to know why Warhammer The Old World's Bretonnians traded their original hippogriff cavalry for Knights of the Realm on foot, when the old lore holds that the Kingdom considers anyone fighting on foot to be a "massive loser"? Why indeed.
Rhodes' semi-accidental rise to a strange kind of miniature painting stardom began with the Warhammer TV YouTube painting tutorials he hosted, working alongside then GW colleague (now painting academy business partner) Roger Yates, which really started taking off around 2016.
By that time, the World that Was had, er, been, and Age of Sigmar was in full swing, attracting swathes of new toy soldier fans. So Rhodes was producing swish new tutorials on Age of Sigmar armies like the Stormcast Eternals, while his Old World favorites the Bretonnians were, as far as he knew, permanently off the menu.
Rhodes didn't really mind. Anyone who, like me, was a fan of the GW videos coming out at that time can attest that he painted Stormcasts and the like with inspiring gusto, and not a hint of the bitterness that some disillusioned Warhammer Fantasy Battle fans were exuding in those days. Hence, perhaps, his deserved reputation for welcoming, Mr Rogers-esque positivity.
His guiding lights, he says, were always the parts of the job he'd enjoyed most in his time at a GW store: "Teaching skills, and trying to make the hobby more accessible". His personal feelings about this miniature or the other, he explains, aren't important, because each video is for the audience who wants to paint that exact thing.
Nevertheless, he jokes that "behind the scenes I'm crying because I want to be painting my Knights of the Realm." A loyal son of Bretonnia to the last.
These days, with the help of Roger Yates and many other colleagues "including some people we used to work with at Workshop", Rhodes is still teaching skills and opening up the hobby. He's teaching mini painting via online courses at the Duncan Rhodes Painting Academy (the name, of course, is Yates' idea, accepted with some trepidation by the famously self-effacing Rhodes).
They're also releasing free painting and hobby tutorials for its YouTube channel using models from various miniature wargames (naturally including classic Bretonnian models like the Knights of the Realm and Green Knight) and promoting the ever growing Two Thin Coats paint range, which now totals 180 colors, with 40 more on the way.
"It's gone really well," he says happily - but "I can't claim to be the full brains behind the outfit; it's having all the people around us that's made all this successful".
For more details and tantalizing hints from Duncan Rhodes about what's coming next for both those projects, listen to the full AMA in the video at the top of this article!
If you want to be in the room for our next live video event, good news - we have loads more of them on the way, covering everything from indie wargame design, to Halo, to Star Wars! Join our free Discord community now to get involved.
And if Duncan's mellifluous tones have you wanting to learn the ways of the brush, you should also check out Wargamer's complete beginner's guide to painting miniatures.
We updated this article on Friday, September 5, 2025, adding in extra details and information from our Duncan Rhodes AMA.