Hours and hours of drawing endangered plants and animals has paid off for a self-taught visual arts graduate whose HSC major work has been selected for next year's Art Express exhibition.
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James Sheahan Catholic High School graduate Sam Kiho said he was thrilled his work Poster Child has been selected for the prestigious exhibition of HSC visual arts projects, which will take place at galleries across NSW next year.
Mr Kiho was told his Poster Child drawings will be displayed at the Western Plains Cultural Centre when the Art Express exhibition visits Dubbo early in 2023.
Another James Sheahan Catholic High School student, Molly Duggan has also had her work selected for Art Express.
"As soon as I found out I was messaging and emailing my art teacher and then friends and family as well," he said.
Art is also something Mr Kiho hopes to continue into the future as a hobby as well as doing commissions for people, as well as doing his own pursuits and he said he's trying to broaden his scope with different drawings.
Next year he also plans to take a gap year and will be working at Byng Street Cafe and hopes he will also be able to travel to Europe before going onto university to study education.
As soon as I found out I was messaging and emailing my art teacher and then friends and family as well.
- Sam Kiho
"I hope to make my name well-known in the Orange and Central West area ... that's my dream goal, to continue drawing and just get better and better and then be well-known," he said.
"I would really like to at the end of it once I've finished studying and done all the other stuff, like to become an art teacher and a hospitality teacher at a school.
"I'm not in any rush, I would like to work for a bit and earn money and live life for a bit before going straight back to school."
His major work included an A2 graphite pencil drawing of lions surrounded by A4 and A3 colour polychromos drawings of endangered Australian flora and fauna with 16 separate images.
"In total the entire series took 164 hours ," he said.
"I would stay up late at night drawing, most days I would stay up three hours a day, just non-stop pretty much."
However, the time spent on each individual picture varied with the A2-sized lion drawing taking about 60 hours to complete an the smaller coloured drawings ranged from a 20-hour eagle and the shortest time was a bird, which took two hours.
"I had a theme and I went along with the theme that I wanted to base the entire series on and I was looking online for endangered Australian native flora and fauna and after that I got like the basis of what subjects I'd like to draw."
Mr Kiho said he's been drawing since he was "a little kid" and he was self-taught from trial and error and continuously figuring out new techniques as well as observing other artworks people have made and absorbing how their's look and what they did differently and then integrating those techniques into his work.
"I tried to incorporate the most heavily endangered and lesser known species that are within Australia and I tried to keep it within my region as well," he said.
"The majority of the drawings that I did were and are from the Orange and the Central West region and even a bit of the Sydney region as well.
"The lions were meant to be the centrepiece of the series.
"The name Poster child was meant to embody how whenever we think of endangered species we always think of the lions, the rhinos, the giraffes, elephants, all those foreign well-known species, while here in Australia we've got our own lesser-known species, which no one seems to recognise or even know about.
"That's why I wanted to have that larger drawing just to highlight how we always think of and acknowledge this species while we've go all these beautiful native flora and fauna that we don't know about."
After completing the 16 pictures, Mr Kiho said the lions were his favourite.
To create each drawing he looked up reference images online and then combined a few reference images to cherry pick different aspects from each of the photos and then combining them into one drawing.
He said the decision about which Australian plants and animals to include was a challenge because there are so many.
"I wanted to capture the most, unique kind of ones just so it looks like I'm capturing each different aspect of our ecosystem and biodiversity," Mr Kiho said.
The Poster Child artworks were recently displayed as part of the James Sheahan Catholic High School exhibition of 2022 HSC major works across all subjects.
"I got a lot of great feedback from everyone," he said.
"In the following days I got an email from Art Express so, when you send in your HSC body of work, when you submit it, you can be nominated into Art Express, which I was.
"I got an email back the following day that I had actually gotten into Art Express and my artworks could be exhibited at a major gallery.
"It's going to Western Plains Cultural Centre down in Dubbo."
The official dates and other successful works for the the Art Express exhibition visit to Dubbo are yet to be announced.
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