MeiLiang Watercolor Paint Set, 36 Vivid Colors in Pocket Box with Metal Ring and Watercolor Brush, Perfect for Students, Beginners and More

Gorgeous, creamy & vibrant colors! The blooms these cause are lovely and they blend nicely. High quality at a reasonable cost. Will continue to purchase these colors! Swatch them first. I do wish the little plastic insert that holds the color trays was off a higher quality and not cheap, fragile plastic. Love the storage tin, however! Nice texture and no weird scent. The greens and reds in this set work incredible on cold and rough texture poster.

I've finally started getting the hang of watercolors and wanted to get something better than what I was using from the craft store, which was a small koi set and a Niji aquarelle set. This set falls into a similar price point to what I've got, but omfg, there is a huge difference.It's not chalky and the colors are much more pigmented. It's still pretty clearly a student grade set, but a much better quality one.I adore the sturdy metal tin, which survived delivery (pretty sure the delivery person chucked it at my house from the street). Definitely reusing that when I'm done with the paint. The included waterbrush is pretty comparable to the Niji ones I have and doesn't leak.The color selection is very nice, and it's effortless to use.The approximately half pan paints are in a plastic insert, which isn't great-it holds the paints, but will definitely come loose from the tin over time, so maybe not the best for travel, but that is good for repurposing.Overall, I'm extremely pleased with them!Edit: after several months of heavy use and learning on my part, this is still an excellent set! While the paints are still quite good for student grade, they are definitely still that, with less pigment and more fillers, so you're going to have to work harder for saturated colors. Also, it might be ridiculous, but the brush has become my favorite and has stood up well to several hours of daily use for months now.You won't regret your purchase!

My regular practice watercolors are Cotman pans, I use them for practice, studies and on the go painting, and the palettes are really hard to beat for portability, mixing areas , the transparency of colors which is important when you begin learning watercolors and affordability when you need new pans. I wanted something larger but no too large to be able to take a couple of larger brushes , and also needed to buy extra color half pans. I found this set, read about them and for the price of just a new metal palette similar in size (like other reviewers have posted) + $6 I decided to take a chance. And I am very happy I did. This set is truly transparent except for a couple of colors, zero chalkiness, they re wet easily and won't rub off the paper after dry. The tin itself is well made, it has a ring at the bottom. The brush is not of use for me because it is very soft and has no much body to it.This set is perfect for practice, I wouldn't use them for final works because there is no light fastness rating compared to my Cotmans for example, but if you use them in your covered sketchbook they should be fine. At first it might seem like there are many similar colors but you'll get surprised once you start mixing. Also having 34 colors the set will last you for a while, considering you can't buy half pans separately. Many of the colors actually granulate very nice which is a nice surprise.This set is way better than other cutesy brands, I was gifted a set of Koi and gave them away because they were so chalky and good only for coloring but not mixing and learn about watercolors. You can actually practice well with this set.I have attached some photos for your comparison with Cotman colors. You have every color you need if you are just beginning with this set and instead of buying more colors or more expensive paint to begin with try buying good paper to really enjoy watercolor and a good brush.

I honestly really enjoyed these paints. While they are not artist grade (aka lightfast), they are still very good quality for the low price. The only complaint I had was the packaging. I disliked the cheap plastic insert that was used to hold the pans and that it was poured and not in half pens. The palette itself was a pretty blue color but the surface underneath the plastic insert was not smooth but had separations that are usually on the mixing tray not on the base. This made it difficult to use it as an empty palette for other watercolor pans. Luckily I had some empty half pans that I used to store these paints but the process of tearing out the cubes of paint was ridiculously difficult. I really struggled getting them out as the company used hot glue for some reason to keep the paints in the insert. this was unnecessary as if you place a drop of water and stick the paint back in, it will not fall out. Also, the insert was glued to the pan itself and once I managed to tear that out, I had to rip the dried glue pieces out of the palette. Overall it took me an hour to prepare this palette lol. So if your buying only for the palette, I would say don’t bother. But if your only concern about buying is the palette and you want the paints, it is hard but not impossible to get the paints out and put them in standard half pans. The ones I had were from meeden and came with the 48 empty pan. They are a little bigger than the regular old half on as far as I can tell. Other than my concerns over the palette, the paints were gorgeous, transparent and mixed very well. It is obvious that they are a student grade version of Paul Rubens as I have the artist grade 48 set as well and it is very comparable. They had a nice color selection but there were no expensive pigments included (like cobalt teal, potters pink, viridian, etc). I noticed that there was a very small selection of browns and that the 2 pinky reds included looked a bit similar. I also dislike that they included a lamp black and a white because with watercolor, unless the white is very opaque, it is typically not much use at all! And the lamp black is usually non granulating so I would have liked an ivory black for mixes. For the price, I would definitely recommend but I would take them out of the plastic insert as otherwise it seems pretty fragile (insert does not stay in palette and moves). Also it looks a bit cheap with the paints in the insert if you care about that sort of thing. Again, the paints mix very well and it is hard to make mud. Actually as I was mixing I noticed that the colors were clean, bright and transparent, which is unusual for student grade sets like this as they are usually more opaque. That is a good thing though as it tells you the quality of the set. I would recommend that anybody looking to make a purchase go to youtube and watch a tutorial from frugalcrafter or kimberlycrickart as both have researched extensively on these and did a very thorough review. But if you have a lot of watercolors, I would pass on these. Also these are probably not for children as I am not sure if they are nontoxic. Should be fine for teens though.