Macy, a couple of my students last year & the year before, despite my
explicit warnings against off brands, had Van Gogh watercolors. I can't
say every color was trouble in every paper/size combination, but trouble
was common enough & severe enough so that I began to use the name as a catch
phrase when something bad could not be explained, as in, "Guess it must be
that Van Gogh paint again."
Rule of thumb: Cheaper paint is not cheaper because the companies are more
efficient or less rapacious, but because expensive pigment is diluted with
fillers. To get a given color density with such brands, you have to use
more paint, which will be, often as not, more expensive in long run. A
major brand is also more likely to state or reveal identity of the
pigment, and hence has an incentive to use the better (more archival)
ones.
There is a cheap brand of watercolor that does, however, seem to work very
well. A Japanese make: used to be Niji, now sold in our school store as
"Rainbow," which I am told is niji in Japanese. It's $4 for a box of 8 or
10 colors. Even though the tubes are teeny, and some of the colors useless
for our purpose, it's still a good, cheap introduction for beginners.
However, students have taken this to mean that any cheap set of Japanese
watercolors is good & this is *definitely* not true. ( And in all of them
you need more paint to get a given depth of color.)
I would still recommend starting with a few large (15ml) tubes of (cheap)
earth colors of major brands, then adding.
Judy