Beer Buffalo

For my up cycling project I decided to make a buffalo out of old beer bottle caps. My main motive for choosing to do this is that I wanted to create something that I feel was cool that I would be able to use/display after the project deadline. Below are pictures from the various steps that I went through in order to achieve a finished product.

I began this design by finding an image of a silhouette of the buffalo that I thought would look the best as well as which one would be the easiest the place the caps on ie. no narrow spots or images with extensive amount of details. Once I found the image I wanted to use I traced it onto a piece of cardboard using a projector.

After I had the outline created I could begin the process of putting the caps onto the cardboard. Originally I thought I would be able to drink enough beer to have enough be I was severely mistaken. The 50 caps that I was able to gather only covered the area composed by the front feet. I began calling breweries throughout Boulder as well as the surrounding area in order to get enough but I was unsuccessful at finding someone that would be willing to give me any. For my next idea I started going to different bars to find the caps and I was fortunate enough to find that Dark Horse used a troff system so they were able to supply me with roughly 200 caps.

Even though I was supplied with all these caps it still was not enough so I had to make repeated trips to Dark Horse to get enough.

In order to fix each one of the bottle caps I used a hot glue gun. The final model can be seen below and consists of an estimated 350.

This is the finished product once I had gathered all of the caps. Below is picture of how I mounted it on the wall as well as some other modifications that are outside the aesthetic of the project.