I’m spoiled. It’s a fact. I’m spoiled on professional art supplies.

This means that I have a lot of tubes and pans of student grade materials sitting around unused.

Since I’ve been offering advice to beginners on this site, I thought it might be useful to actually use some of these student grade paints and see how they are.

Today, I’ve chosen a Paul Rubens 36 color tube set. It’s relatively inexpensive on Amazon.

I had to curb my expectations a little before I began painting, knowing that these paints would not have the same vibrancy and color mixing quality as what I am used to can produce.

That said, beginning with moderate expectations, I am not thus far terribly disappointed with these.

The colors are vibrant, although they dull a bit when dry. They have a decent consistency and some of the more classic colors like burnt Sienna and ultramarine mix well and produce the expected results.

I’m not thrilled with the green selection, but I never am. I tend to mix my own greens and tube greens always look unnatural to me.

There are some nice red shades in this set and although some of them had to be toned down a little for this project, I think this would be a lovely palette for floral paintings.

I was impressed that the paints don’t have that weird sheen that you sometimes get with less expensive paints made in china.

If you are looking for a bargain paint set to begin your watercolor journey with, I don’t think this would be a bad choice.

There are a lot of student sets out there, but this one seems really good for the price.

You can have my pro paints (temporarily) but you’ll never pry my Arches away 😊

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