How it all started...Hi, my name is Hrvoje (ha! good luck trying to pronounce that one ;). Ever since I was a kid I loved to play, tinker, question, explore, wander, do things the 'wrong' way, make a mess, and generally have weird ideas. Like most kids do! As life was happening and I was getting shaped into an adult with supposedly his act together, I tired to play and wonder in a grownup kind of way: I set out goals. I created many but basked in more spectacular failures than accomplishments. And that was ok, because all the while, to the chagrin of 'real' adults, I loved trying things out making sure to keep my inner trickster alive, resisting the pressures of the so-called real life. Like children, I've tried to keep things light and take most stuff in stride, riding on exhilaration of testing out yet another bizarre idea. But the orderly world of adulthood kept pushing back until, aside from an occasional air guitar session (on mute of course, because let's not get carried away while the kids are sleeping), there were not too many ways left to indulge in my child-like weirdness. While my inner weirdo desperately demanded to be revealed to the world, I couldn't blame anyone for expecting me to act mature.It's easy to mistaken a child for a grownup because so many of them, like me, are trapped in an adult body! |
After successfully ignoring the truth for a while and living a buttoned up life of a working professional, I could no longer ignore the nagging child inside. It was my 5 year old son Fran's scribbles that did it. They were simple yet intriguing. Strange yet funny. The characters he drew were combinations of all the crazy things he hasn't apparently yet been taught don't go together, don't work that way, are not appropriate or pretty. As any parent can attest, these doodles were beautiful in their apparent ugliness and their weirdness reigned supreme! After meditating on these unpretentious scribbles, I found myself reviving my inner child in all its weird glory. I felt a familiar flame firing up a long repressed rebellion against things making sense. Fran's "aimless" drawing reminded me of the fun I had as a kid not doing things with a fancy purpose, just giving them a go! |
Realizing that as weird as I was, I couldn't pull this one alone, I got together with a bunch of like minded first class weirdos I respect for their various unique shades of craziness - my siblings. We got our weird heads together, the beer was flowing like wine, and thought long and hard about how to celebrate the messyness of growing up and this courage kids don't know they have to try things out just for the fun of it, no matter how strange it seemed. The triumph of playing around over worrying about where it's going: misfits against conformism! Skully and Friends was born. So who does the work around here?Our designers are little funny mysterious creatures from this planet. We often call them children. After some careful research, we have found that every child's little skull is a home to a whole bunch of lively mysterious creatures. What breaths life into them is their landlord's crazy imagination! They have stories to tell. Now, at first glance, these creatures can seem a little freaky, because they don't follow any rules of what anyone or anything should look like. So be ready for some mindblowing aesthetic horizon expansion. They are just a bunch of buddies chilling in the skull(y), welcoming you to their way of weird! Their unassuming coolness, chill vibes and the ease of the work-in-progress attitude gave us so much joy, we knew it would be beyond uncool to keep Skully and Friends all to ourselves. What we needed to do was clear: introduce Skully and Friends to the outside world. |
Wait, what about me?Then we thought: hey, there must be lots of Friends out there living in obscurity of their creators' Skullies thinking they may be the only ones daring to be weird. Well, we believe they deserve to see the light of day and be celebrated for embracing their weirdness and owning their stories! So, as you're reading this thinking: totally! I know tones of skullies and their friends: my daughter, nephew, grandson, friend has introduced me to so many of them through their drawings... guess what? We want to meet them and so does the funloving world! Head over to My Skully (personalized gifts) and send us a photo of a Friend that we have to meet with a few words about them and we'll honor their story with a t-shirt to call a home away from their skully home and be an inspiration to us all :) |
With my wife at art festival Samoborska Dvorišna furka, Croatia, 2018.