There is no debating that this is a really awesome deal for this price. The brushes, brush bag, paint set, tin and packaging are all quality products that happen to be gift ready in a nice presentation. I would highly recommend this to any student wanting to seriously learn watercolor painting. The beautiful round paint brushes come in 3 useful sizes with extra pointy tips that can allow for amazingly fine detail. Some people who aren't as prone to making tiny detail strokes may not like how pointed these are, but it worked perfectly for my needs. They retain a lot of water and didn't shed.
For professional users, there are several small things I would change. This set comes labeled as a "basics" set, implying you have the basics needed for color mixing. To be fair, it does have a great CMYK and the white is actually opaque to be useful as an alternative to gel pen or for making pastels on dark papers. However, the neon pink is very weak, hard to reactivate, chalky and fugitive. The magenta color is much nicer for diluting to pink colors and is much more likely to be lightfast. Since the phthalo blue is the only blue, swapping this neon pink for an ultramarine would have been cheap for the company and more beneficial for mixing.
The "fair skin" color is heavily diluted with white and leans towards yellow too much, making it a warm peach color that is not realistic for skin. Unfortunately this pale color is not economical either, and I really wish they had included a warm brown like burnt sienna instead. It would have diluted to a more realistic skin tone, while using a tiny amount of paint in comparison.
If they had swapped those two colors this would have been a totally perfect set that would contain everything you really need to paint on a student or professional level. There are alternative paint sets out there in this price range that may be slightly better, but none that come with these remarkable brushes.
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