Chocola 36-Set Watercolor Tubes: A Budget-Friendly Way Into Watercolor

Introduction

Good budget watercolors are hard to find. Many cheap sets wash out into muddy, lifeless color, and they often come in flimsy packaging that dries out after a few uses. The Chocola 36-set of watercolor tubes manages to avoid most of those traps, offering 12 ml tubes of surprisingly vivid paint at a price most people can reasonably consider, especially if you are just finding your feet with the medium.

This review looks at what you actually get in the box, how the paint behaves on paper, and a few details worth knowing before you buy.

What You Get in the Box

The 36-set is the only size Chocola offers, and it arrives in a sturdy box that does not feel flimsy. Opening it reveals two layers of tubes: one row on top and a second layer beneath. Each tube holds 12 ml (0.41 US fluid ounces) of paint.

The tubes themselves are soft plastic rather than the metal aluminium used for higher-grade artist tubes. That material choice has a real practical benefit: the caps unscrew easily and close with a tight seal. Anyone who has struggled with stiff caps on premium tubes, particularly with arthritis or wrist issues, will appreciate this. After extended use, opening, squeezing, and resealing, none of the tubes dried out or caused problems getting paint back out.

Each white tube carries a colored band identifying the pigment, the pigment name and numbers, lightfastness markings, and an opacity legend printed as a small circle: filled, half-filled, or empty.

Swatching and Color Palette

The palette in this 36-set is genuinely well balanced and comprehensive. You get a good spread of greens, including olive and aqua tones, and because watercolor mixing is far more forgiving than mixing with, say, colored pencils, 36 colors here can produce a very wide range of values and tones.

The set includes two metallic colors, gold and silver. If metallics are not your thing, it is a fair question whether they earn their place. In practice they barely affect the palette: the provided greens darken easily into richer, deeper tones, and the rest of the range lets you mix whatever value you need. Swatched on Strathmore 400 series watercolor paper, the richness of the color going down is noticeably good for the price point.

Testing the Opacity Legend

Chocola prints an opacity legend on each tube: a fully filled circle means opaque, a half-filled circle means translucent, and an empty outline means transparent. It sounds odd for watercolor, since adding more water makes any watercolor more translucent, so this called for a hands-on test.

Using Naples yellow (opaque), scarlet red (translucent), and ultramarine blue (transparent), the test laid each paint dry and undiluted over a dried black stripe, then lifted portions away. The results matched the legend well. Naples yellow covered the black almost completely. Scarlet red partially showed through, much like a frosted bathroom window. Ultramarine blue visibly showed black through it on either side, behaving as a true transparent color. The white tube, which is watercolor rather than gouache but marked opaque, also covered black convincingly.

The lightfastness markings are less straightforward. The tubes carry either three or four crosses, but the published legend only defines three as excellent and two as good, and no tube carries two. Reading it charitably as a typo, that would mean 23 of the 36 colors rate good and 13 rate excellent. More importantly, the brand does not specify whether testing follows ASTM or Blue Wool standards, the only two worth relying on for professional, sellable work, so treat the markings as a rough guide rather than a guarantee.

Reactivating After Drying

Not everyone has a palette that keeps paints moist, so a practical test was to let squeezed paint dry out and see how it reactivated. Left to dry, the paints rewetted and reactivated easily, performing well the second time around. The paint itself has a beautiful soft texture that lays down and blends effortlessly on paper, another genuine strength at this price.

Who This Set Is For

This set makes the most sense as an affordable entry point into watercolor. If you are a colored pencil or acrylic artist who has never touched watercolor, this is a great way to learn how the medium works, how it can get away from you, and how to fix mistakes, without spending what artist-grade paints cost. Even intermediate painters who work with pans and want to try tubes would find this a sensible starting point.

The paint performed well on both Strathmore 400 series paper and the higher-grade 100% cotton Derwent Inktense paper, so it is not fussy about paper quality. And while the lightfastness claims deserve a pinch of salt, that does not diminish the set’s real purpose: learning, practicing, and creating genuinely beautiful artwork at a low cost.

Buying Advice

If your priority is professional, archival work you intend to sell, look for paints with verified ASTM or Blue Wool lightfast ratings and be prepared to pay more. If your priority is learning watercolor, experimenting, or adding an affordable tube set to a pan collection, the Chocola 36-set is an easy recommendation. The vivid color, soft handling, easy-to-open caps, and well-judged palette deliver far more than the budget price suggests.

Conclusion

The ChicolA 36-set of watercolor tubes is one of the more impressive budget paint sets available. The opacity legend turned out to be accurate in testing, the palette is balanced and flexible, and the reactivation performance makes it practical for everyday use. For beginners, hobbyists, and anyone easing into watercolor without a big investment, it is a set worth serious consideration.