Could be D&D elf ranger

This looks again like some D&D character art, but can’t be sure. Anyway, a basic leather clad green–brown wood elf ranger with a bow, long blonde hair flowing below a hood and a funny cloak made of tree leaves apparently. But what kind of bow is he holding? It’s very strange indeed, the size is of a longbow, but it has the ears (upper and lower tip) of a recurve bow. The grip part is from a longbow again. Kind of a mix between European and Asiatic styles. Could work, but should maybe bend a little bit more in this picture.

But now to the main issues.

Mistakes:

1. The form of the archer is completely wrong. I guess that the maker of this picture have looked at some Japanese archery photos, but they have nothing to do with European or any other Asian archery styles. The Japanese shooting style with a raised arms are only used with hankyu and daikyu, the Japanese short- and longbows, which are asymmetrical in shape with a much bigger upper part than the lower. And anyway with the Japanese style both the arms should be raised, now this elf only has raised his string arm. This posture is stupid. All his lines are lead to different directions. The line of the arrow (A), points a bit downwards, so the arrow won’t fly very far, only below ten meters. The line of his bow arm (B) crosses with the line of the arrow, since it poins a bit upwards, and this shouldn’t happen. C is the line of the archers string arm, but only forearm, since his upper arm points toward the sky (D). All these lines should be as parallel as possible, so that the drawing of the bow wouldn’t be so hard and tiring and the missile would fly straight to where the archer is aiming at. Now it doesn’t happen.

2. The bow is tilting downwards, because the arrow is nocked on the string too low. A good five centimeters higher would be better. I’ve drawn the red box to show the position of the bow now, and the blue one to tell how it would be better. He’s still aiming downwards but maybe his target is a goblin again?

3. The bowman has a hip quiver, which is much more practical than a back quiver, but this one is positioned horizontally, when it should really be vertically attached to a hip belt or a baldric (belt going over a shoulder). Being horizontal is very bad, since the arrows fall off it easily while running.

4. There are more mistakes! Seems that the archer has gripped the string with only his index finger, which is very hard, since it would require tremendous index finger muscles, which this skinny fellow hasn’t got. The other option is that the bow is very low poundage (i.e. ineffective) and doesn’t require much strength to draw.

5. The arrow is too short for this bow, since the arrow tip just barely reaches over the bow’s back at the front. In fact the archers straightened index finger of his bow hand goes further than the arrow. This should not be the case.

6. The arrow which he is shooting in this picture also doesn’t have fletching at all! The purpose of fletching is to get the arrow flight more straight, so it’s easier to hit a target. Most probably the draughtsman has purposefully left the fletching out, since it would’ve covered the bowman’s face a bit. And of course face can’t be covered by some “unnecessary” feathers! The fletching wouldn’t have hurt, since the feathers can be minimum 1 cm high (and then some 15 cm long), and rounded in profile, so they wouldn’t have even covered his face much.


Good:

The bow does bend and not only the string stretches, which seems like the most common mistake in these archery drawings around Internet. But not much more good to say about this. Maybe I tried to say something good, since this is not terrible, at least if the form of the archers string hand would be correct. But much worse is to come later…