Nicpro Watercolor Paint Kit, Painting Supplies Set 12 Tube Water Color Paints, 6 Synthetic Squirrel Brushes, 6 Papers, Palette, Instructions for Kid, Artists, Adult

★★★★☆ I've been doing digital art on and off for several years, and a gaming friend that I shared my works with always encouraged me to try physical painting. I decided to start with watercolors since I really don't have a good workspace for painting and the inherent messes that come with it.I have bad memories of the cheap watercolor paints I had to use in school; I could never get them to work right. So I decided to try liquid watercolor paint instead of the solid form in a tray and got this. I've got a picture of my very first passable art attempt with this kit shown.The instructions are....ok. They're clearly written by someone that doesn't speak English as a first language. With regards to painting techniques, the instructions even tell you to just do internet research, which is what I did and found some good guidance videos on YouTube.The brushes seem to work fine. I've seen videos in which the video host or hostess directly says not to try squirrel hair brushes like these, so I'm guessing these brushes aren't the best, but for the price, I don't think it's an issue with this kit and I appreciate the included cloth bag to store the brushes. The included paper works well in my limited experience. You can see by my artwork that I went REALLY heavy with the paint and the water, and the paper held up just fine.The palette is a simple piece of plastic. It works fine; Paint won't stick to it at all when wetted properly with water, and can easily be scrubbed off when dried. Bear in mind I clean the palette after I finish painting, so I don't know how easy or difficult it would be to remove dried blobs of paint out of the palette circles, I've just had to scrape off small bits of dried paint that I missed during cleaning.The paints themselves are a mixed bag... Some colors, like my Cobalt blue, are a bit runny and easy to over dilute with water. Others like my Crimson Red seem nice and fresh, the paint flows and behaves as I expect it to. Then there's my Titanium White.....That paint is OLD. It always comes out lumpy, and I have to mix it so vigorously with water that I get air bubbles in the paint!! Worst still, the lumps simply turn mushy and just transfer to my paper. If you are able to zoom in, look closely at the moon in my artwork. You might see that the paint looks badly mixed. It looks like blobs of solid paint swirled in with watered paint. I spent a lot of time repainting the moon, because air bubbles kept coming up from the freshly applied paint. The stars were drawn in with a white "watercolor" colored pencil.This is irritating, since I use white often in both my artwork and in mixing for color tone variation. I may even just buy a single tube of Titanium white, since I'm having so much trouble with the tube of white I got in this kit. That being said, while I'm embarrassed at how crude my artwork turned out, I know that is lack of experience and technique on my part, BUT, I'm very pleased at how colorful the art turned out. One nuance that kept me from trying watercolor painting is again, in school I could never get a well colored painting with decent depth, and I clearly managed that on my first attempt here.This leaves me torn as to whether or not I would recommend this kit to anyone. Again, I'm happy with the quality of the paper, brushes, and palette. Some of the paints are fine, some are great, and others like my Titanium White are terrible. I would say look up other kits first, but if this has everything you want, then it may be worth taking a chance on.

★★★★★ The paints are high quality and easy to work with. I do medieval illumination so not all the paints are usable for me. Some are modern versions of toxic period ones which with practice can give as good coverage as period. All in all it is a decent set for basic color set for any getting started in many areas.

★★★★★ This kids love these. They love the fact that they can mix colors, unlike traditional kid watercolor sets. They’re easy to use and beautiful colors