Gayle Uyehara's "The Deadheads" in Vibrant Color Wins Award

Gayle Uyehara with her award-winning "The Deadheads" at Cypress Community Gallery, Cypress, California.

Gayle Uyehara’s colored pencil artwork The Deadheads was awarded the 2026 Vera

Curnow Founder’s Award from among 50 artworks recently displayed at Cypress

Community Gallery in Cypress, California. Gayle is a signature member of Los Angeles

District Chapter 214 of the Colored Pencil Society of America (CPSA), having been

juried into six of the organization’s annual exhibitions.

“My reference photo for ‘The Deadheads’ was taken during a visit to the Twin Cities. My daughter was attending veterinary school there when the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum was holding its Tulip Festival. It was the last day of that event, and while I took some photos of the flowers on display, I kept going back to baskets of deadheads.” Asked why she was inspired to create a large, detailed image of a tangle of composted blossoms, she said, “I just liked the color.”

After working on it for three years, she finished the piece at the start of the pandemic, when many art exhibitions were online-only. Gayle feels the piece is best appreciated in person, and she put The Deadheads aside. When the opportunity arose to enter it in CPSA District Chapter 214’s 2026 annual exhibition at the Cypress Community Gallery, her skill–and patience–were rewarded with the organization’s prestigious Vera Curnow Founder’s Award.   

Gayle has been creating images of plants and animals in every medium for as long as

she can remember. “I use colored pencil—both oil-based and wax-based—because it allows for a lot of control on a variety of surfaces. The Deadheads was done on Graphix .003 drafting film, matte two-sided, using Faber-Castell Polychromos and Prismacolor Verithin pencils,” she said. “I find that drafting film can take many more light layers of pencil than Graphix Duralar or Mylar. The actual number of layers depends on the wax content of your pencil and I pick light-fast, semi-opaque pencils to work with on film.”

She recounts that an exciting world of new possibilities opened when a Botanical Artists Guild of Southern California (BAGSC) member organized a workshop with artist

Wendy Hollender, who works in colored pencil. Then ASBA’s 2014 conference in Denver fueled Gayle’s passion for botanical art and reintroduced her to working in colored pencil on drafting film. A session with artist Susan Rubin in Denver introduced her to different types of film, a substrate she had never considered drawing on.

Now she is hooked, and the rest is history.