Color Name Art Acrostric

My colored pencil art class continues and I'm having so much fun with it! I'd started by watching videos and reading articles about specific skills I wanted to improve, but those just made me realize how much I didn't know about the basics. I'm now going back and watching all of Sarah's colored pencil videos. Her first-ever live stream inspired me to make this: 

This challenge was up on her channel right before she went live. Rather than just answer the question, I turned it into a coloring project. You know how much I love name art!

I started by identifying the colors I would use. Crimson and Yellow came to me right away, as did Indigo for I. But I was stumped with N and D. I thought about using Non-Photo Blue, but I consider that to be a B color, not an N color. For the same reason, I didn't want to use Dark Green or something like that for D. Eventually, I came up with Navy and Denim. They're more similar to each other than I would have liked, but I couldn't think of anything better. Then I realized that three of the five letters in my name would be blue (without a single B in my name), so I switched Indigo for Ivory. 

I used PicMonkey to design my acrostic:

I knew I didn't want to color on copy paper again, and I didn't have any drawing paper that would work in the printer. So I used a light box and traced with a black Pigma Micron pen onto Strathmore drawing paper. Affiliate links here and below. A tip: use paperclips to attach the papers so that they don't accidentally shift while you're tracing. 

For each color name, I chose three Prismacolor Premiers. Using light layers, I put the color that best matched the color name in the center (in this case, Crimson Red), then blended that with a lighter color on top and a darker shade on the bottom.  

I struggled coloring Ivory. I don't have very many pale colors, so I used Eggshell as the middle and blended it with White and a Warm Grey. I don't love it, but it's fine. I definitely need more colored pencils in that range.  

When I got to the blues (Navy and Denim), I needed more options beyond my small collection of Prismacolors. My single Caran d'Ache Pablo was just the shade I needed. When I sharpened it, that's when I realized the mistake I'd made with my swatches. I hadn't sharpened the various pencils to see how well they held their points. The difference between the Prismacolors and the Pablos was shocking. I love my Prismacolors for how well they blend and how brilliant the color is, but the Pablos sharpened to a much, much finer point, great for getting into tiny spaces. Now, in addition to needing more shades of Prismacolors, I need Pablos for detail work. Or maybe another brand/model? I need to retest all of my higher-end colored pencils. 

Overall, I'm happy with my finished name art, even though I don't think the colors work well together. Crimson, Ivory, and Navy look pretty good together, and adding Denim is fine. But I don't like Yellow and Ivory together at all. When I cover one or the other, I like the remaining palette so much better. 

One thing I love about this project is that everyone's palette is different. I may have to do a little experimentation to find what name generates my favorite color palette. If you can think of one that works well, tell me in the comments!