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Animals

Free bison SVG files

Free bison SVG files: an American bison in profile, a running bison, a head from the side and from the front, a skull, a calf, a cow with her calf, a bison with mountains cut through its side, a prairie scene in a ring and a name plaque. Each is drawn by code as clean closed shapes.

13 designs. Free for personal and commercial use, no sign-up. What you can do with them.

Sizes, materials and what to watch when cutting a bison

A bison is front heavy: nearly half of the animal is hump, head and woolly forelegs, and the back half is small and neat. That makes the silhouette a sturdy cut. Every file is 100 mm on its longer side. On the bison silhouette the legs are about 5 mm wide above the hoof and the thinnest part is the tail, about 2.5 mm wide, with the horn close behind it. Vinyl and card hold that down to about 50 mm long. In 3 mm plywood keep a standing bison at 100 mm or wider.

The bison with a mountain scene has the finest work: the rim round the cut sky is about 3 mm and the pine trunks are narrower still, so cut it at 100 mm or larger and weed the sky in one piece from the tail end.

Bison or buffalo

The animal of the American plains is a bison, and most people in North America also call it a buffalo, so the files answer to both names. It is not the water buffalo or the Cape buffalo, which have long sweeping horns and no hump. The bison skull is wider across the brow than a cattle skull and its horns are short hooks. None of these files is a team mark or a coin design: each is the animal drawn from its own outline.

How to open the files

  • Cricut Design Space: choose Upload, pick the SVG, and add it to the canvas. Set the width you want; the shape is already welded.
  • Silhouette Studio: Designer Edition and above open the SVG. The free Basic Edition does not, so open the DXF instead.
  • LightBurn, xTool Creative Space and Glowforge: import the SVG, then set the layer to cut, score or engrave.
  • Inkscape, Illustrator and Affinity: open the SVG. It is a plain filled path, so you can recolour it, add a stroke or combine it with your own work.
  • Printing or sublimation: use the PNG, which has a transparent background.

Each design page lists the file’s narrowest part at seven sizes, so you can tell whether it will survive at the size you plan to cut.

Questions

Is a bison the same as a buffalo?

In North America the two words mean the same animal, the American bison. The files here show that animal: a shoulder hump, a low woolly head, a beard and short curved horns. True buffalo live in Africa and Asia and look quite different.

How do I put a name on the bison plaque?

The bar under the hooves is a plain rounded rectangle about 100 mm wide and 19 mm tall when the file is 100 mm wide. Lay your lettering over it and cut it out of the bar, or cut the letters from a second colour and stick them on top.

Which bison is best for a small sticker?

The bison silhouette and the running bison are solid shapes with at most one inside cut, so they can go down to about 50 mm. Keep the mountain scene and the prairie ring at 100 mm or more.

More free SVG files