Co-signing the Cotman/Van Gogh route; try to avoid sets stuffed with white/black and chalky fillers if you want clean mixes. The biggest upgrade for that juicy flow is paper - use a decent 140 lb cold press pad and your colors will brighten up even with student paints. Skip the bundled brush kits and grab one good synthetic round (size 8–10) plus a small detail round; that’ll cover most needs. Two water jars and a quick swatch card of your colors will help you keep mixes fresh and avoid mud.
The “all eggs” risk is real but you can mitigate it: choose a zero-knowledge manager, use a long passphrase you can remember, and add 2FA (ideally a hardware key) to your account. Disable automatic autofill or require click-to-fill so it won’t dump credentials into a spoofed page & and keep an offline recovery kit or encrypted backup in case you lose a device. If cloud sync still makes you nervous, a local-only manager trades some convenience for fewer online attack paths.
