Gerald Hough [aka. SkekTek] - Artist Interview

I am a Professor at a small college in south Jersey. I teach Biology and Psychology courses as part of my normal job routine, instructing anatomy, physiology, research methods, and animal behavior. As such, I get a lot of experience looking at animals. However, I have always been a graphic artist on the side, and as a lark, I’ve been designing shirts for woot’s shirt derby for over a year. I have 1 printing at shirt.woot, with many other designs ranking in the top 10 as ranked on bestlosers.com. While I really enjoy my job, making goofy shirts is a great way to relax!

My typical day is waking up with my wife and two sons, and making breakfast. Waffles! From scratch! Kids usually help, which means most of the batter ends on everything but the pan. Then, everyone gets showered and dressed. Wife starts kids on books or games, while I go into work.

When I’m not preparing lectures or wasting time on the internet (Twitter and Mafia Wars suck my time away!), I train homing pigeons for a project involving understanding how creatures learn about their environment as a model for Alzheimer’s research. After a long day being a bird brain, I go home.

Play with the kids for several hours until bedtime. Then, I read them stories, we sing songs, and they go to bed to read or sleep, whichever they prefer that night! Then me ‘n the wife either read books, partake of the Netflix fun, or on designing nights, she reads while I putter around Illustrator. Then bed. Occasionally there’s gin and tonics while designing as well.

* Favorite movie: Tie between The Dark Crystal and Tron (what can I say, I’m a geek)
* Favorite music: Alternative rock and electronic: fluke, Charlotte Martin, Silversun Pickups, Fluke, Daft Punk
* Favorite TV: Right now, 24, House, Stargate in all its forms, Eureka, and The Guild (On-line)
* Favorite T I’ve designed: In the year you were born contest, I did a fake moon landing that scored fourth place. That has to be the best work I’ve done with both overall concept and execution. A close second was the background to my banner, called “Hope”.
* Favorite shirt someone else did: I wear it all the time- Louisgorskograd’s Sputnik shirt ( http://shirt.woot.com/Friends.aspx?k=3864). Very classic, but very wearable red shirt. Plus it’s got Russian on it!
* Art projects outside t-shirt world: Yeah! I’m a a teacher so a lot of my artistic works go into my lectures and presentations. I do all my illustrations for my papers in Illustrator and Photoshop/
* I am most proud of winning the Shirt.woot derby, considering I’ve not had any formal training (aside from a course or two in art in the 80’s). Second place out of over 200 entries was pretty cool! Oh and outside designing, I got to sing tenor at Carnegie Hall when I was in High School. That was awesome!
* Fellow advice: Keep it going- the support may start up slow, but it’ll build as you get more fans! And keep submitting designs- you never know when a fan base will latch onto your work and let it fly!