Spanish illustrator Ave Félix applies the logic of the plot twist to everyday reality, building a surreal illustration series that flips the assumed relationship between knives and vegetables, dogs and bones, paintings and observers, to ask what would happen if the world worked in reverse.
A plot twist, in narrative terms, is a radical change in the expected direction of a story. Ave Félix took that literary technique and applied it to the everyday. Knives slice vegetables. Museum paintings exist to be observed. Dogs adore bones. Planes fly through the sky. These are the givens. Upside Drawn starts by accepting all of them, then reverses every single one.
The series is built on a simple premise with near-infinite application. Each illustration takes a familiar assumed relationship and inverts it, producing images that are simultaneously legible and genuinely disorienting. The humour is inseparable from the concept: the comedy arrives at the moment of recognition, when the brain registers what has been swapped and experiences the wrongness as funny. The irony runs underneath, asking why we accepted the original arrangement as natural in the first place.
“I’m interested in the gap between what we take for granted and what would happen if those assumptions simply stopped applying,” Félix says. “The plot twist is a way of making the familiar feel suddenly strange.”
The illustrations are clean and precise, with the graphic confidence of work made for editorial and advertising contexts, which gives the surreal content a quality of mock seriousness that amplifies the effect.
Ave Félix is a Spanish illustrator specialising in narrative and conceptual art for editorial and advertising, blending pop culture references and analogue techniques into visual worlds that communicate complex ideas at a glance.
Website: avefelix.com Instagram: @avefelix_
Upside Drawn. Digital illustration series. All illustrations: Ave Félix.
