COLD by Bill Streever, Phd. 

Keith Hayes at Little Brown hired me to create a beautiful image for this natural history book about the phenomena of COLD. It was a daunting project. The manuscript was so interesting and the book had so many big ideas and accounts of exploration in the Arctic. I wanted to come up with a concept that made you feel cold when you saw it on an emotional level. I wanted to create a landscape that was beautiful but also barren.  I created this image by sandwiching 6 layers of various colored and frosted Plexi glass that I hoped would simulate the color and feel of great ice sheets and ice burgs. The type treatment was also cut from frosted Plexi and glued into position.  I made a "ledge" over the 6-sandwiched pieces and laid the  "snow" and " white ice" by using sea salt and sugar.  We back lit the prop to give it a strong luminosity, and used long exposures to burn in the small Dedo spots that were set to skim over the snow.  The prop "landscape" was about 11 inches wide by about 17 inches high. The set with all the lights was about 20 square feet.  I learned that at the first presentation, many thought that it looked too much like water.  So I went back into the raw files and "took out the water" - leaving it more of a white snow driven landscape. Despite the beautiful haunting cover that Keith designed the project got killed. Tim Hsu of Hsu and Associates designed a beautiful cover which was accepted.