Skull-A-Day began in June 2007 when Scalin, at a creative crossroads, decided he would make a skull every day for the next year. He went to his studio, cut the shape of a skull out of an orange piece of paper, uploaded it to his computer, and started a blog to chronicle his upcoming challenge. Over the next 364 days, Scalin used any and all materials at his disposal to create images of skulls out of light bulbs, bubble gum on sidewalks, googly eyes, acorns, and pretty much anything else you can imagine. Though he worked as much as 12 hours a day on a single project, he finished and uploaded a skull every day.
And as his project grew in scale, so did his audience. By the time he posted his final skull in June 2008, he had tens of thousands of people viewing his blog on a daily basis. Shortly after the end of the project Lark Books published Skulls, a book featuring skulls from the first 5 months of Skull-A-Day, and Martha Stewart had Scalin on her show to talk about his goal and to make the Peanut Butter and Skully (which she then ate!). While the idea of creating a skull every day for a year came to Scalin as a remedy to a creative block, it quickly became his most popular work. “I never imagined that by the end of my little personal project I’d have strangers coming up to me on the street saying, ‘Hey, you’re the skull guy!’” The release of this 260 page hardcover with over 380 color illustrations, featuring a foreword from Mütter Museum curator Anna Dhody, is an affirmation that the physical book is far from dead, and can be found at thriving independent bookstores.
