Welcome!

Welcome to Crap Archery – a blog which doesn’t take itself too seriously but nitpicks with great devotion about all the errors, mistakes and misconceptions which rid the popular belief concerning everything archery related; bows, arrows, archers, techniques, etc.

Archery is frequently depicted on popular films, tv-shows, videogames, thousands of drawings around the Internet and in all kinds of other media. The portrayal though does leave much to hope for, since it’s accuracy, authenticity, practicality and overall usability mainly range from almost okay at best to utmost monstrosity at worst – and believe me – these horrendous depictions are as widespread phenomenon as overall lousiness of the most liked pictures on DeviantArt’s main page.

When I made a quick Google search for archery drawings I got tons of results which were wrong in so many ways, that I just had to start this blog in order to correct the view. Since practically every drawing had their bows and shooting postures wrong, that only leaves me thinking that none of the makers of those pictures have ever seen a real bow live, let alone held one in their hand or never ever released an arrow from the string.

I myself have of course held a bow in my hand, shoot with it many times, studied archery techniques and different bow types with much enthusiasm, have I even been making a longbow myself. I hope my work in this field with this blog will bear fruit so that future artists, moviemakers and game developers would understand better the basics of the function of a bow, how it is made and how shoot with. That would made drawings, games and movies, no matter are they intended to be realistic, modern, historical, fantasy or sci-fi, only better. Little accuracy and realism never do any harm to these productions.

Post scriptum:

I do not think that my little blog would change anything with movies or videogames, but at least it shows how ridiculously they usually portray archery, as well as they do with many other things, especially related to gear and tactics intended to be “historical”. And if I get at least some artists to pay more attention to detail and sources when drawing bows and archers, that’s always bonus!