Here’s what’s going on our first T-shirt

Soon you can wear Claire Warhus’ wonderful illustration about salty male tears, with sales supporting her work and ours.

Back in May we reported on men getting salty about Half-Stack Sessions, a group that aims to empower women and non-binary people in the local music scene. Along with that story, we ran an illustration by the inimitable Claire Warhus, a Madison-based artist known for everything from tattoos to zines. 

I love Claire’s work, whether she’s crafting something dark and elegant or drawing a dick with sunglasses riding a skateboard. It’s that combination of serious craft and occasionally crude humor that makes Claire so awesome generally. In her illustration for this story, she delivered the most brutally funny interpretation of the phrase “male tears” that I’ve ever seen. People loved the art and some folks asked about putting it on a T-shirt.

Even before that, we’ve been thinking about making shirts at Tone Madison. But instead of just doing shirts with our logo, we thought we’d make limited-edition ones, partnering with artists to make cool art shirts (splitting the revenue with the artists) and maybe coming up with our own designs to reflect the sentiments and weird in-jokes that come out of our coverage. We probably should do one with our logo eventually—another Madison-based artist, Shelby Floyd, did a killer job with it. But anyways, the real point of the idea was to create shirts the celebrate the work of local artists and, in a roundabout way, help people feel more involved in the conversations we’re trying to start with our journalism. 

This time we’re offering the shirt in three colors. They’ll be printed at False Floor Press in Madison. Above are some mockups courtesy of Lauden Nute.

We’ll be selling these for $20 but will discount them to $15 for our Patreon donors. As we gradually get more of these shirts going, we’ll figure out a better way to integrate them into donor rewards. We’ll be posting a discount code for donors on Patreon soon. Order here.