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.