Is it a woman or a man, hard to tell from elves sometimes!

Does it say 2003? From time they still did concept art for games by hand? Nice. Although this isn't so nice than it could be. Mistakes are:

1. Stupid looking bow with unnecessary appendages which make it less effective.

2. Too big and heavy looking arrowtip. It's like a javelin tip.

3. Wrong grip with the string hand, palm up please!

4. Back quiver. Once again.

I don't recognise this as a bow

This "artwork" is a straight up copy of a game character from Aion, one of those stupid Asian MMORPG:s which I don't want to easte my life into. Many people do apparently, otherwise there wouldn't be a market for so many of those, and they all are copies of each other. They also do very bad when concerning realism. Especially archery. Mistakes in this one are as follows:

1. If there wouldn't be an arrow I wouldn't even recognise that this is a bow. It is so ridiculously ugly piece of crap that I don't want to look at it.

2. There is no bowstring.

3. The arrows is too far up from the bowhand and seems to be missing fletching. But it feels like nitpicking compared to the bow which is stupid beyond belief.

4. You cannot shoot with a gauntlet with huge claws like that. It would also probably damage the string.

5. No other arrows, no quiver anywhere.

This game is so ugly that I wouldn't play it even if they would pay me the 12 to 16 dollars the MMO:s usually cost a month to play. This is the worst picture I've seen this year. Hopefully the year has only just started a month ago so there will be a lot more of these horribilities coming. Stay tuned!

Dryad from Witcher 3

This is the dryad Morenn from the Witcher game series, and the picture is from the third game.
It is technically a good digital drawing, but the archery is technically not good. It has mistakes:

 

1. The arrow would fall off of here easily because the bow is in sideways position.

2. She's wasting a huge lot of energy by pulling the bow when she's not actually shooting. Don't do this. The grip is almost a thumb grip, but a little erroneously drawn.

3. The bow is wasting it's potential when the string is not attached to the nocks in the very end of the bowarms.

4. There are no arrows anywhere else to be seen, and no quiver.

Also the bowstring looks very thick, but I have not given it a mistake point. But maybe should have.

 

I have continued my criticism with other dryads of the Witcher world in a later post, that you can find here.

What's the point of fire arrows in Mordor?

This may be a Mordor orc or a goblin or something. I don't really care. But what I do care about are the mistakes!

1. This bow is stolen from Lara Croft. The young version, with more clothes and less boobs than usual. Also less of a bow, since it's made out of a bunch of sticks. It would be quite easy to make a bow from one piece of wood, but maybe orcs want to make everything crappy on purpose. Then again in many fantasy lores they are good craftsmen and smiths, but it doesn't really show since their products are terrible and typically unusable crap. Like this bunch of sticks here.

2. Are all these arrows used thousand times since the fletching of orc arrows is always so bad? Too little space between the fletching and the nock maybe be half the reason for that. And what is the purpose of keeping the arrow between teeth? It would seriously be in the way of the bowstring while shooting, and getting the arrow from there is not in any way faster than from some other places. I would even guess it would be slower to get it from there. Faster would be to keep several arrows in your hand already, either the bow hand or the string hand (the latter is even faster of the two).

3. He has a back quiver and a hip quiver, but why? If you are used to a hip quiver, why to have also a back quiver, isn't it just confusing? Why not two hip quivers, people (and orcs) have two hips after all?

4. The grip is wrong, two fingers used instead of three and the hand is palm down when it should be the other way around in this position. Also nobody would want to spend their energy unnecessarily by pulling the string half way back at this point when the bow isn't pointing anywhere near the direction of shooting.

5. Fire arrows. Stupid fire arrows again. What are he going to set on fire? The rocks? The volcano? It is already on fire! And there's nothing else that can be burning in a range of miles around him. The land of Mordor is completely barren. Fire arrows were not shot against people, since it's completely unnecessary, people die perfectly well from hits of regular arrows, and actual fire arrows would do less damage to people than normal arrows, because of the structure of their arrowtips.

Should I be worried about men who draw these sexualised little girls?

This bow is just ridiculous. I don't want to talk about anything else here. This bow is waaaay too thick to be usable by anyone, let alone by a girl who's arms are three times thinner than the bow itself. If there would be a machine strong enough to pull this bow two string would just snap in before the bow could really bend. If the string would be magical and not break the handle of the bow which is five times thinner than the arc, would break and the whole bow would snap in two parts. The handle is usually the thickest part of the bow, not the thinnest. This bow is so wrong there is just now would it could be usable in any magical fantasy world ever created.

She has a hip quiver too. And hips of an adult woman connected to the torso of a prepubescent girl who's boobies are almost slipping out of the underboob-cut vest. What's wrong with Asians?

Bladed bows don't really work

I always feel a little bad when destroying these drawings which are obviously made by teenagers. I wasn't a perfect draughtsman when I was a teen, artists journey continues his whole lifetime. But I like to think that these pictures have circulated in the Internet for years, maybe even decades already, so the initial teens who have made them are not teens anymore but adults who can take criticism without sniffing a pea into their noses (is that a proverb in English, I don't know, at least in Finland we use it... a lot, tells something about people around me, doesn't it). On to the mistakes:

1. Ridiculous bow which is too thick and heavy, has unnecessary spikes and apparently quite long metallic blades on both of its arms, which are so big and attached to their whole length that they wouldn't let the bow bend. It would be impossible to shoot anything with this thing. You just cannot attach blades to a bow like this.

2. The arrows don't have any space between the fletching and the nock, which is a bad thing.

3. Arrows from a back quiver, which is really impractical and almost never done in history, at least in Europe.

4. Left handed archer. I still count this as a mistake, since I don't believe for a moment that it is intentional, the draughtsboy just didn't have a clue where he should put the bow.

Please remember from now on: bows bend!

This was recently posted on Facebook and I thought it was actually quite funny. Sadly the draughtsman didn't use reference for the bow, since it does not bend here. I have drawn in red where the bow should bend.

This is one of the most common mistakes when drawing a bow, inflexible bow arc and stretchy string. No, bows do not have rubber bands on them, the string don't stretch and bows are made of wood (mainly) in order for them to bend and provide the necessary power to propel the arrow forward. Making an inflexible bow with stretchy string would be much less powerful, it's like a slingshot compared to a bow, the first one is a toy, the second one is a weapon.

So all people who will ever draw a bow, please remember this, bows bend and the string doesn't stretch. I would be happy if you would remember this.

Mini arrows cannot be shot like this

This little drawing would have benefited for little more thinking before putting the marker on paper.

Mistakes:

1. This arrow is waaaaaay too short, like one third of the length it should be. It would be impossible to shoot like this. In real life short arrows are possible to shoot if the archers has a special piece of equipment which goes by many names, Koreans call it Tongah or Tong-ah, Turks call it Majra or Nawak and Romans in the medieval times called it Solenarion. It is a half tube, made of wood, of bamboo in the far east, and it allows the arrow to be overdrawn, so that the arrowtip is drawn behind the arc of the bow. Without this device shooting of very short arrows wouldn't be possible. This dude in the picture should get one, or make it by himself, they're pretty easy to make.

2. Sideways shooting. There is absolutely no point of shooting sideways here.

3. The bowstring seems to be over the bow arm here, which is so great a mistake that not even a person who holds the bow for the first time would ever in any circumstances do it. It only happens in drawings where the draughtsman has absolutely no clue of how archery works. This picture's drawer has claerly never shot an arrow in his life.

4. The position of the string hand is awkward and tells of bad grip.

5. Arrows on the back, and even of the wrong shoulder where they would be almost impossible to take out.

This was bad, this was definitely bad.