How to Customize Your Luggage - Can't Draw? Neither Can I. How to Easily Transfer Drawings.

It has been a while since I have been on a trip that required air travel and I forgot how annoying it can be to retrieve your baggage from the baggage claim carousel at the airport; when the majority of people own black luggage that all look alike. On this trip there were several instances where I was about to take another person's luggage off the conveyor belt only to realize at the last moment it wasn't my bag. This isn't a huge problem but nonetheless it could have resulted in an embarrassing situation that can now be easily avoided. "How you ask?" Simple all you have to do is customize your luggage with your favorite pop culture reference. "But Danthemakerman, I can not draw!" you say. Neither can I but there is a simple way to transfer drawings on to your luggage or most things really.

Before we get to the main Instructable I wanted to add this short Instructable on repairing a broken wheel on your luggage. Upon returning from my trip I noticed one of the wheels on my luggage was broken so I decided to see if I could repair it. The wheels are held in with a long rivet. So I used a drill bit that with a slightly smaller diameter than the rivet to drill out the center. Removing the rivet will allow me to remove the broken wheel. The rivets were so thin that I didn't even drill through them so much just sheered them at the shaft which gave me the same result, a broken rivet.

I bought a pair of replacement wheels from Amazon. There are tons of options to choose from so make sure you measure your wheels to get the closest match. Also make sure the screw shaft they offer with the wheels is long enough to fit your luggage. I didn't find direct replacements but I was able to find some that were a couple of millimeters smaller than the original wheels. So I ended up replacing both wheels. The kit came with washers for spacers but they were too thin so I used my own washers to make up the gap on either side of the wheel. You can see in the 3rd picture the order in which I assembled the wheel.

When you tighten the wheel make sure its not too tight or the wheel will not spin freely. Adjust the tightness so that they wheel still spins. And that's it the wheels are replaced and good as new.

The first thing I did was to clean the luggage using an old toothbrush. I just made sure to get rid of any dirt or obvious spots of dust.

In order to prep the surface of the fabric for color I sprayed the luggage with multiple clear coats of spray paint. I sprayed about 3 coats. I probably should have sprayed more coats but ultimately, here I am trying to seal the fabric so that it will hold the paint and not just soak in to the fabric which would cause blurry edges. I let the clear coat dry for a couple of hours. My garage is very hot so it dried fairly quickly.

First a little disclaimer. There is a link in this step that goes in to more detail of some of my process. Its fairly in-depth so I linked it below. Its not necessarily laziness on my part it just that it involves the computer so its essentially a screen recording of my process. And I feel like screen grabs don't do it justice and are harder to follow versus a video in this case.

I am a big fan of Batman and the comic book artist Jim Lee so I chose the image above for luggage. When I do my Google image search I add the words black and white to the search bar as black and white images are easier to transfer. However they can be color images as well. You can print out a color image but this will waste a lot of color ink, which is expensive. If you want to know how to create a black and white image from a color image I have a Youtube video that shows how to do that using free software.

How to create black and white image from color drawing

Once you have your image you have to print it it out and in my case since it was covering a large area I printed it out on to several sheets and taped them together.

Before I could trace the image on to the luggage I had to stiffen the fabric otherwise it would droop down when applying pressure. So I cut a piece of cardboard and some other scraps to reinforce the inside of the luggage. I just shoved the pieces of carboard under the two rails which stiffened the luggage fabric. The point here is to just make sure it doesn't sag on you or move on you while you work. Alternatively you could pack it full of clothes but that's a lot more work and heavy.

So here is the big reveal and the one thing that makes it so that anyone can do this to their luggage. I used white transfer paper to allow me to trace my image on to the luggage. This is very much like the graphite paper of olden years that used to used to copy things while typing. It works the same way, first I taped the transfer paper down to the luggage, then I taped my printed image to the luggage over the transfer paper. Then using a red ball point pen I traced all the black lines of the image. I used a red pen so that I could tell which lines I had already traced, using a black pen wouldn't be as obvious and may result in missed lines. Once I finished tracing the entire image I removed the printed image and transfer paper from the the luggage. The last pic is what the transfer paper left behind.

Now its just a matter of tracing the image with some paint markers. I bought two different paint markers one has a fine tip and the other has an ultra fine tip. I used the fine tip to trace all the details and the fine tip to fill in the larger areas. There are various tips the paint markers come with and even some large over sized tips as well. I probably should have bought a chisel tip as well which is larger and covers more area but I didn't. However, these two markers did the job well enough.

The last pic shows the first pass of tracing. I wanted it to be a brighter white so I traced everything again so that it would pop a little more. I probably traced the image of Batman 3-4 times just to get it to the point I liked it but that was just a personal preference.

You can't erase paint markers on fabric or at least I don't know of way to do that but you can fix any mistakes by using a black paint marker. Here I show an area that didn't seal very well with the clear coat and bled in to the fabric; this is one of the reasons I think I should have sprayed more clear coats. I used my black paint marker to clean up the edge then I can further refine the area using my ultra fine point white marker. The last pic shows how the forearm looked very blotchy, I was able to fix this using the black paint marker. You can see it looks way better in the finished piece. You may have to do multiple coats of the black paint marker to cover the white paint marker but it will cover it.

The original Jim Lee image had a bat signal in the sky but my printed image didn't have it. So instead I just used a round object and traced it to create a oversized moon. Then I just added some squiggles to make it look like craters or texture. I actually over did it with the squiggles and then used my black paint marker to cover them up. It was a "less is more" type of situation.

Its not as perfect as Jim Lee's but I am happy with how it turned out. It will definitely stand out from the rest of the black suitcases on the luggage carousel. I also used the same method to add the Batman logo to the front of the bag. The last two pics are just some close up shots to show the detail.

I hope this inspires you to customize your own luggage. It doesn't have to be a Batman image it can be anything really. A giant happy face, a rainbow, a dragon or anything else that brings you joy.