Do not lean back when shooting!

 

Many mistakes in today's drawing, which isn't a bad drawing expect the archery part in it. Which is, the main part unfortunately. 

Mistakes:

1. The bow is way too thick, this elf woman wouldn't be able to shoot with it, nor anybody else. Especially a bow this short should be much thinner, at least by half.

2. There is nothing where the bowstring would attach, it just disappears inside the ends of the bow. The bostring in reality forms loops that are put in nocks in the bow's ends.

3. The arrowtip is huge, too large for this arrow shaft. The arrow is also too short, or drawn too much back, since the arrowtip touches the bow's arc, which it shouldn't do.

4. The arrow goes on the right side of the bow, which is very unusual (I would almost say wrong, but there are a few rare medieval illustrations like this) for Mediterranean style shooting, and she should hold the arrow there with her thumb if shooting from the right side, otherwise the arrow would drop off too easily.

5. Mediterranean draw uses three fingers, she seems to use only two, which is unnecessarily harder. The bowstring doesn't seem to go behind the drawing fingers, rather through them.

6. The fletching of this arrow is pathetic, the feathers are both way too small to offer anything to the arrow (their purpose is to guide the flight of the arrow, making it more accurate), and localted way too back on the arrowshaft, so much so that they touch the drawing hand, which they shouldn't do.

7. She is not wearing a quiver nor any spare arrows anywhere. Not a very wise choice.

 

I also want to point out another thing, about her posture.

 

8. The posture is all wrong. People often draw female archers leaning backwards from their pelvis, to make them look sexier, but this is not a good posture for shooting a bow. Rather they should be leaning forwards, as was done both historically and today. This employs the big back muscles (stronger than just the arms), which gives maximum power to the shot. I have included a picture from a book "Archery Anatomy" (1995) by Ray Axford that depicts the correct posture for a modern archer that uses his back muscles more by leaning forward. I replicated the lines of his body in green, and the lines of the elf girl in red and superimposed them on top of each other so you can clearly see how much differene there is in the postures.

I have a request to draughtsmen and -women, please start to draw correct positions, and do not make your (lady) archers lean back to make them sexier, since it's just bad archery.

Sometimes you need to lean back in order to shoot very high, but this is not the case with this or any other drawing that employs this trope of backwards leaning women.

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.

Dryads from Witcher's world

I love the world of the Witcher. I read the first book not too long ago, and I've played through the first and second games. Unfortunately I haven't yet had time to read rest of the series as well as play the third game. But they are on my list as soon as I can manage to have some (read = a lot of) free time. I've also seen the first season of the Netflix series, but in my opinion it's not nearly as good as the books or games. It is too dull, too grey, not funny enough, and I hate the costumes, and some choices made in the casting. Geralt himself is fine, although he could do more than just grunt and be angry all the time. Hopefully the second season corrects the mistakes that are possible to correct.

I was pointed out recently that a post of mine that I thought of having been a half-orc woman, was actually a dryad from the Witcher 3's Gwent cards (a minigame inside the game). And it's true of course, how could I have missed that! Well, I haven't yet played the third game at all, and although this same dryad was in the first game, I didn't recognise her. I just didn't connect the dots in my mind. Generic female half-orcs do look similar, I will say in my defense. Anyway, my bad, now the blog post is correctly titled, and I got inspiration from that to make this post concerning the dryads in the world of Witcher.

 

This dryad is jumping while shooting. Hard, but certainly possible. The arching of the back that far is not good form though, much more power you get by leaning forwards from the pelvis with a straight back. But then again she's leaping in the air. The back arching this way is done to make her more sexy of course, since men are naturally drawn to arched backs like this, as science has shown. On to the archery mistakes:

1. If your bow has started to grow leaves, it's made of way too fresh wood! The bowstave should dry a long time before making a bow out of it, one year is not a bad time. Making bow out of fresh wood is a bad idea, since wood is a living material and the properties of the bow would change when the wood dries, ruining the bow's carefully designed performance abilities.
2. Making a bow out of a tree branch like this is also the worst idea. Real self bows are and always were made of one piece of wood, carved out of a tree trunk at least twice if not four times larger in diameter than the finished bow. So there's a lot of material to remove to make the bow in desired shape. Picking a sprout dividing into several branches is bad, as is the fact that this looks like the very tip of a tree, which would make it unsuitable for a bow. For example English longbows were made of the part of a yew tree where the heartwood and sapwood meet, to make the belly of the bow (heartwood) more resistant to pressure and the back of the bow (sapwood) more resistant to stretching.
3. The fistmele (distance between the bow handle and the bowstring) is way too big here. It should only be about hald of this distance. This bow has too short bowstring. It make the shot less powerful because of the wasted distance where the string could still pull the arrow forward.
4. Where are her arrows? There are no quiver or any spare arrows to be seen.

 

Eithné, queen of the Dryads and ruler of the Brokilon forest, as seen in the now defunct The Witcher Battle Arena illustration. The maker of this drawing has never seen human legs in his life, since the character has an entire leg growing out of her knee, the leg certainly doesn't start from the pelvis, like legs usually do. I know perpective and anatomy can be hard, but not this hard! Look at a human being, look at a photograph, look at a mirror, you have legs don't you?

Also the dryads are described as slender and small in the books, so how come this forest lady has silicone boobs?

On to the archery mistakes:

1. I searched for a moment where the bowstring actually goes. It is blurred in this image, in the ah-so-fashionable-motion-blur-effect, which they think makes drawings look like photos, but is just becoming annoying at this point since its serious overuse in concept art. It's a cheap Photoshop trick that requires no painting skills. But I was supposed to tak about archery stuff! Okay, okay, the bowstring does not touch the arrow. When the bowstring is released and is still angled like this, the arrow has not yet left the string. Only at the point when the bowstring is completely straight, thearrow leaves the string. What is drawn here cannot happen in reality.
2. This elbow is too high, and so is the shoulder of this same arm. It's bad form that does not use the back muscles correctly.
3. No spare arrows or a quiver anywhere, again. Do the dryads grow arrows out of themselves? Where do they come from?!? 
4. The bow handle is way too long. A bow is not a two handed weapon like a longsword, a space for only one hand is needed in the handle part. Too long handle takes space away from the bending arc of the bow, making it not as powerful as it could be.
   

 

 

 This picture I found from the Witcher wiki, and it was said to depict a dryad. It has grave mistakes:

1. The bowstring goes from the outside of the bow arm! This is very bad mistake, which not even a beginner would think of doing while actually holding a bow, but is alarmingly common in drawings. It happens so that the drawer first sketches the character and the bow in a certain position, and then don't realise where the bowstring should go. In some cases when the bow is canted to a ridiculous position, like completely sideways, there is no space for drawing the string under the arm, so they draw it over it thinking it must be so. It's wrong!
2. The arrow hand is upside down, grabbing the string the wrong way. We should see the palm of her hand in this picture. You might argue that maybe she's just placing the arrow there on the string like this and the changing her hand position, but I don't think the drawer has thought it that much.
3. The arrow is not nocked where it should be nocked. I drew a line to show you where the arrow should approximately be (if everything else would be correct with her bow handling, which isn't).
4. The back quiver. Not the most useful thing to have. Also making it even less useful you can put it on the wrong shoulder like this dryad has. Impossible to take the arrows from there. The length of the arm is just not long enough to draw arrows over the opposite shoulder. Also all the arrows in the quiver are broken, since they come out in a very wrong angle compared to the scabbard.

 

 

I know this is not a dryad, but a drawing of Braenn, a human woman, who was raised by the dryads. I just came by this picture, so decided to include it here because of the subject. Mistakes include:

1. Drawing the bow halfway while not shooting. One of the more common mistakes in drawings. Even a halfway draw is tiring to keep up, so no archer would ever do this. Traditional bows are not like modern compound bows where you can hold the bow for a long time while aiming. This girl is not even aiming, so what's the point of drawing the bow like this? There is none!
2. Two finger mediterranean draw, and the posture of the hand is very awkward. Three fingers would be better in this case.
3. A back quiver. Also on the wrong shoulder, so completely impossible to use.
4. The arrow is too short. The bow is half drawn, but there's not much arrow left to be drawn. It should be some twenty centimeters longer. Also the handle of the bow is unnecessarily long.

 

 

I will end this post with this lovely image of a dryad mother and her child, making arrows together. The picture is so lovely I don't want to ruin it with my red numbers, but it isn't without mistakes either:

1. The arrows are way too short. They should be almost double this length. The perspective alone cannot explain their shortness.
2. The feathers her child has gathered are lovely, but all different. You should use the feathers of the same bird (species) in an arrow, or at least very similar to each other (yes, sometimes people make the cock feather out of different species, but historically they tended to be all the same). Some species (like goose), are considered better for fletching arrows than others. You should even use the feathers from the same wing for the best results (so not mixing left and right wing feathers, since they curve in the opposite directions). Maybe the child didn't know this?
   
3. Why is she holding the thread between her teeth like that? I've fletched my own arrows with feathers and string, and I never needed to do this. I cannot understand what would be the point, since it's not even the end of the string. You can tighten it with you fingers too.

 

This is it for now, see you next time!