Ranger on hooves

 

The man who drew this could use some reference for both horses and archers. The horses legs are just too big. Also the head is a little too wide. But anyway, this is a horse archer, not very often featured in this blog, because everybody just loves to draw female elves on trees, or ranger looking male archers crouching in shadows under their hoods.

Well, this man has a hood too, naturally. He's just a ranger on a horse. Mistakes regarding archer are:

1. Sideways shooting. Again, there is no point in this. Some people claim it is useful while hunting in thick bushes. But this character is on horseback, so what's the excuse?

2. Mediterranean draw with only two fingers instead of the usual three. The position of the hand is strange, since it is not tilted, while the bow is.

3. A huge back quiver. It is good to have a lot of arrow, but horse archers always had a hip quiver. East Asian horse archers too had a hip quiver, it was just different than in western Eurasia. They took the arrows under their armpit, not over the shoulders, like fantasy archers always do.

4. Why is he leaning so much forwards while shooting to the side? It has no purpose and doesn't make sense.

The bow, while being tiny, is not impossible. Horse bows were sometimes very small, which made them easier to operate on horseback. Small stature of the bow necessitated them being made in the recurve method, so that they were powerful enough. This bow could be more recurved, but it is passable.

I would regret this so bad!

 

I feel a bit sad while criticising this, but a lot sadder for the person who actually has this tattooed on her/him! Mistakes:

1. This cheap Pocahontas knock-off has a modern bow that doesn't fit the character at all. It's handle part is way too long, and she doesn't even grab it by the middle. It is okay for certain bows to grab it just below the middle, so that the arrow would in in middle, but never over the middle part like this. I don't think the tattoo make was qualified enough to attempt a rudimentary perspective here.

2. She is neither grabbing the string at the middle, but far above it.

3. The arrow is just ridiculous. The shaft is a thin line, but the head is a huge triangle and ball of material, much too large and heavy for that shaft.

4. No spare arrows, no quiver.

This is it. I hope tomorrow brings something a little better.

There's a hood, but no robin

Another one of those mysterious hooded archer characters. These are getting pretty boring. This has some mistakes too. I didn't bother with numbers in the picture this time, but you'll get it anyway.

Mistakes:

1. Sideways shooting is always unnecessary. There is no reason why the character in the drawing should shoot like this. Hold your bow upright, or a little canted, but not sideways like this. This is obviously done to look cool, but it just looks stupid to everybody who knows even a little bit about archery.

2. The grip seems to be always hard to draw without reference. That's why people should use reference photos when drawing archery, or anything really. The right hand should grip the string but it doesn't. It seems to only be grabbing the arrow, which goes strangely through the string, or that's how it looks. This is impossible.

3. The fletching of the arrow is horrendous. This is not even an orc character, so please draw proper feathers there.

4. The man is not using his back muscles to draw the bow, which can be seen from the fact that the drawing arm's elbow is pointing too much to the side, when it should be pointing more towards the back.

5. Spare arrows or a quiver do not exist.
 

Faceless space archer

 

Another drawing here. And another woman. This time without a top, and without a face. I guess he drew only the important parts for him. But mistakes too:

1. The bowstring goes from the wrong side of the arm. It is impossible to shoot like this! A horrible mistake, which could've been avoided with even a small amount of thinking, that hasn't been involved in the making of this drawing.

2. The infamous reverse grip. This is not a standard way of gripping the arrow. Also the string goes way too deep in the fist. This is just a mess.

3. There are a lot of things attached to the arrow shaft, making shooting it impossible, since the spikes would stick to the bow arc when released. Ludicrous!

4. The arrowtip is way too large and heavy, Even if the arrow would fly out of the bow, it would not fly more than a few meters and just drop head first to the ground.

5. The arrow is also too short. This makes its flight distance even lesser. Also the fletching sucks big time, it's another mess.

6. No spare arrows or a quiver anywhere to be seen. 

This character only has one arrow, and it's the worst I've seen. And she cannot hold the bow right. Not a very professional archer I would say. Also, where's her face?!?

You believe in horoscopes, but not in physics?

 

Hi, I'm back again, from a summer vacation. I will be on and off from this blog from time to time. I need to take breaks in order to continue mocking other people's efforts. That's hard you know! ;)

This time I will criticise this Sagittarius tattoo concept drawing. Let's get to the mistakes:

1. The most obvious one, the bow is not bending, but instead it has a rubber band string. This is so frustrating, and could be corrected by looking at a single photograph of a real person shooting a real bow. But no, many people think looking at reference is cheating and somehow not artistic. But in reality all the real artists have always used reference from real life. You should do that too if you want to become an artist someday.

2. These ugly blobs are taken from modern wooden bows, but now their shape serves no purpose, they look horrendous, and they incorporate too much space of the bow's arc compared to the limbs. Since these parts do not bend (if this bow would bend at all), they waste a lot of useful bending space of the limbs if they are too big like here.

3. This is not a proper draw. The string goes only under the ring finger. Nobody has ever done this, because it doesn't work. Reference people, reference!

4. The elbow is too bent, losing a lot of energy to try to draw the bow like this (this is supposed to be full draw).

5. The whole posture of the figure is awful, and wrong in many ways. Nobody shoots like this, arching their back like in this drawing. This is only drawn to make the female character look sexy, and it's wrong. The back should be straight, and perhaps the upper body tilting forward from the pelvis (the back still straight), to give maximum muscle power to the shot.

6. The arrow goes on the "wrong" side of the bow. This is difficult, because everything is wrong in this picture. First of all the archer is left handed. I have stopped giving this a mistake point due to several complaints by the (left handed?) readers. I know there are left handed archers, and always have been, but I don't think people drawing these images think about that, they just draw the image whichever way looks more pleasing to them. Since no care has been given to handedness, I used to mark it as a mistake. But because the very best historical archers would probably shoot both hended, I have stopped giving this a mistake point. This character is supposed to shoot with the Mediterranean draw, although it's drawn completely wrong. If we suppose it would be right, and she's a left-hander, then the arrow in most cases should go from the other side of the bow. There is a heated debate going on in the internet regarding the sidedness of arrows in historical Mediterranean style shooting. The fact is that most of the times the arrow was on the left side of the bow (with right handed Mediterranean shooters), so here is should be on the right side for a left-hander. But it's not. So it's a mistake in my books.

The only good thing about this is the hip quiver, instead of the ubiquitous fantasy back quiver.