Art With a Message--Ride Safely : Contests: Fifth-grader submits the winning drawing for a CHP billboard campaign aimed at young bicyclists.

A boy about to enter the fifth grade posed stiffly for cameras Thursday in front of the poster that put him into the spotlight. He had never seen his drawing enlarged to billboard size, and the attention left him with his hands at his sides, fiddling with his shorts. A TV interviewer approached and squatted next to the 10-year-old from Covina.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Paulo Naguit, the winner of a California Highway Patrol bicycle safety awareness contest, revealing a braces-filled grin. “I’m just glad that I won.”

Paulo’s design beat out several thousand other posters submitted by students across the state, and it will be pasted on about 100 billboards as part of the CHP’s bike safety campaign. Officers unveiled the drawing of a helmeted boy on his bike--framed by mountains and a beaming sun--and congratulated the artist at a parking lot news conference outside a CHP station encircled by freeway interchange ramps.

CHP Southern Division commander Edward Gomez hoisted Paulo up to the microphone so the boy could give a word of advice.

“Um, drive safely,” Paulo said sheepishly, as his mother, Maritel Naguit, snapped pictures and his stepfather, Manny Naguit, videotaped the conference.

Paulo spoke softly while the cameras were rolling, but talked freely later when the topic turned to the Lego toys that he desperately wants, preferably before his birthday in January.

Other members of the boy’s family had also come to support him--his mother’s aunt and his 1-year-old brother.

At home, where the Filipino American family speaks Tagalog and occasionally cooks a beef soup called bulalo that Paulo relishes, relatives urge him to keep drawing, whether it’s boys on bicycles or monsters, which fascinate him most of all.

His favorite subject at Cedar Grove Elementary School is drawing, and he says that when he grows up he hopes to be an artist, although his mother, who works as a banker, has a slightly different plan for her son.

“You can be an architect. That’s also an artist. Or you can be an engineer like your papa,” she told him.

The boy with mousse-slicked hair said he didn’t think he would win when he finished the drawing in February, but the chrome-colored BMX bike he received as a grand prize thrilled him more than Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, both of whom he has come to doubt. Paulo has to wear a helmet when he mounts his new bicycle, although he says he prefers not to.

Artistic aspiration had nothing to do with entering the contest, he said: “I was bored and there was nothing to do. I really didn’t want to do it, but my parents told me to.”