Illustrations and a mock up

I thought I would bless the blog with an update on where I am getting on. I have created a rough mock up of what the book might look like when it was finished, it is terribly rough and covered in glue stains, but it helps to see it as a finished product:

The front cover is a work in progress - I want far more texture and and purple in the night sky, and lots more smaller, possibly golden, stars (I am also not even convinced by the title!) The following are the most finished pages currently (although all need a good polish and amendments made).

I am struggling with a couple of illustrations for the following lines:

Yellow is a sudden smile, and awful outburst of laughter,

Yellow is bananas and custard, and feeling sick after

These are pivotal lines in the book, about the guilty feeling of enjoying life after someone has gone, and because they are abstract feelings, they are very difficult to produce images for. Illustrations to text need to tell more than the text itself, and I want the illustrations to picture the guilt, the sudden stopping of living as you remember those that are missing, the aches in the stomach that can never be filled. These images need to be filled with turmoil and confusion in their mixture of contrasting feelings - and I am currently completely stuck! In every illustration I am trying to include clues of the missing person - displayed in purple (in the examples above there is an empty place mat on the kitchen table, and in the second, more positive image, the silhouette of a head can be seen in the music, to indicate the triumphant memory of the person within the newly grown daffodils) - and this is a further problem I am having to illustrate these difficult lines. I am hoping some sleep, and a walk by the sea tomorrow, might give me some inspiration!