(Models: my sister Kristi & good friend Eric)
This is the first shirt that I put into production. It is a satire on my home, Tuolumne County. It is a play off of Nor Cal and So Cal and the lame, imaginary rivalry between the two (Of course I like Northern California way better then the southern portion). I created it in the winter of 2006 while I was living in Telluride, CO after I left CSULB and Southern California for good. Soon after producing these I decided to drop the usage of TUO*COU. There were too many similarly named/looking groups including So Po (Sonora Posse) and TUO CAL (Tuolumne California). I hated continually explaining that I had nothing to do with those groups and that I didn’t “steal” their idea. TUO*COU was a term coined in my social group by my friends Kyle and Eric (pictured above) while they attended the University of the Pacific together. Here is the tattoo that Eric had done years before I ever made the shirts:
