Penny Richards' photos with the keyword: backpack

Coach backpack, upcycled with leather paints, inks, and metallic markers.

I made the backpack below as a custom order in 2009. And the owner loved it, so she sent me a second identical backpack, and asked me to put the same photo on it, just in case something happened to the first! It's not identical, but it's very similar.

Black Coach backpack, found in thriftshop and altered with gesso, acrylic paint, sharpies, ink, and gel-transfer of image. Image of dancer Ruth St. Denis is from the New York Public Library's uploads to Flickr Commons (see below).

Thrifted black Aurielle backpack, upcycled with gesso, acrylic paint, sharpies, ink, and modpodge. SOLD 1/10.

This was a custom order for a friend. She provided an all-black backpack, and she provided the image she wanted me to use--a class picture from a teachers' college c.1929. (Her grandmother's in there among the new teachers all in white.) Background is gesso, acrylic paints, and sharpie markers. Because the flap is very flexible, I didn't use paper collage--instead, I made large xeroxes of the central image and transferred them using a gel technique. The whole thing is modpodged, and then kryloned for weather resistance.

Upcycled from a plain black thriftshop backpack with gesso, acrylic paints, paper collage, sharpies, modpodge, and krylon. Image of Hedwig Reicher as Columbia, at the 1913 Suffrage Parade in Washington DC, is from the Flickr Commons uploads of the Library of Congress (See below for original.) SOLD 8/09.

Upcycled from a plain black thriftshop backpack with gesso, acrylic paints, paper collage, sharpies, modpodge, and krylon. Image of Hedwig Reicher as Columbia, at the 1913 Suffrage Parade in Washington DC, is from the Flickr Commons uploads of the Library of Congress (See below for original.) SOLD 8/09.

This was a smallish black backpack-style bag, found in a thriftshop and upcycled with gesso, paint, sharpies, collage, modpodge, and krylon. The images are of Ruth St. Denis's "Radha," as found in the New York Public Library's Flickr Commons uploads (see below). The Spanish-English dictionary fragment inside the buckle includes the words dance and dancer (as well as damsel, dandelion, dandruff, and dandy ). SOLD 10/09.