Comedian Keith Lowell Jensen approached me for a poster campaign for his tour, KLJ ADHD AF, built around a show where he digs into how ADHD shapes his comedy. He was refreshingly hands off. The only real note he gave me was a request to work in a visual reference to Ritalin somewhere in the piece. If you look closely at the shattered lens of his glasses, you’ll find the molecular structure hidden there.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I was undiagnosed myself. Looking back, I think that’s part of why this one came together the way it did. I wasn’t illustrating ADHD from the outside looking in, I was working from some subconscious, half understood place that turned out to be a lot closer to home than I realized.

Instead of trying to represent the condition literally, I wanted the piece to feel like what it’s like inside a mind that won’t sit still. Tangents overlapping, focus sliding sideways before you can catch it, that constant antsy hum. The central image became Keith’s head breaking apart and spilling out of a pill capsule, a mind refusing to stay contained. The palette, all that coral, teal, and yellow, was chosen to feel high frequency and a little jittery on purpose.

Since the piece needed to travel with the tour and get reused across different cities and dates, I built the poster like a pharmaceutical label mockup with a flexible date and venue field, and handed Keith a Canva version so he could update his own tour info without needing me for every stop. It’s a workflow I lean on a lot for touring clients and festival work, since it keeps things moving without becoming a bottleneck.

The static poster eventually grew into a small suite of motion pieces for social too, sized for both Feed and Story placement, kicked off by a teaser clip of a pill bottle rattling before the art explodes into frame. Small thing, but it captured the energy of the show pretty well.

The illustration went on to earn a spot on the World Illustration Awards Longlist in the Advertising category, which still feels surreal to type out. Of everything I’ve made, this is one of the pieces I’m proudest of, not because of the accolade, but because it’s one of the rare times the work and the person making it were quietly saying the same thing before I even knew it.