My work usually looks nothing like the poster I did. I paint very realistically—painstaking, meticulous work. But since this was for a poster, I wanted it to have more of a poster feel to it. That's why I picked the surreal colors.

I chose the poem because I liked the idea of painting something with music and the night sky. I like to draw people, so I wanted a person in the image, and since the poem is about music, I wanted the person playing music.

I took my friend, Hakeem, downtown with me and had him pose. He's not a saxophonist, but I took the picture of him in the position of how he should be. Then I took a picture of a saxophone player, to get the hands right. And then I combined the images in a drawing, and painted it.