Ione was assigned the story The Four Letter Word Is Love.

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The words of ‘The Four Letter Word is Love’ clung to my heart from the first read through. I felt the deafening loneliness swell as everyday tasks became hard and human contact dwindled.  For me, the story spoke of the importance of love, kindness and human connection in an increasingly contactless world and how without these things life can feel like a struggle. For many, the lockdown took away what little independence people had left, while it simultaneously encouraged people to find new ways of interacting and in turn allowed some to make life-long friends they may have never met otherwise. This bittersweet feeling is what I wanted to recreate in my artwork and I chose to focus on light and sequential narrative to develop these complex emotions into an illustration.