How not to (Corel) draw a bow

If this really is an official Disney image, and not just some random fan picture, I'm really surprised. This looks so badly Photoshopped and fake that I have almost no words.

Now that may have been an over-exaggeration, I do have words, but not very nice ones. Here they come, the mistakes:

1. This picture is so obviously fake that it hurts my eyes. I can see that the woman, the horse and the background are all composited together in an editors basement, and not captured in Scottish highlands as they should be. But the worst thing is that I think they computer generated the bow. It looks like she hadn't had a real bow, if anything, in her hands, since the positioning of the bow is unrealistic and the arms of the woman don't look like they would be doing any activity that require muscle tension, like drawing a bow. If she had a bow in hand, she didn't draw it, somebody else drew it in the computer later. I cannot figure out why would they do this instead of giving her a real bow. If they really are Disney, there should be no problem of getting a real bow.
A real bow would bend like I have drawn in the picture, this bow doesn't, so it probably doesn't exist. It's also way too thick for her.

2. I already said that the arms don't look like they would really be drawing the bow. This arms elbow is pointing too low. The arrow is also too low for this style of (European) shooting, but it is done so that it wouldn't obstruct the viewers view to her face. Beauty is more important than practicality it seems.

3. The arrow has fallen off from the top of the bowhand here, or if the arrow didn't exist when they took the photo of the woman, then it is Photoshopped too low.

4. Now there actually is a hip quiver, which in itself is a good thing. But it is way too loosely attached on the hips with that belt so that it can jump all around while riding and possibly dropping the arrows. It also looks like that the quiver terminates somewhere inside the flowing dress way before it shouls stop (the arrows are too short then, this seems like another Photoshop mistake).

The lesson learned today: do everything you can before the camera takes the pictures, not in the editing phase with a computer. Photoshopped photos look always edited and fake.

Brave (complementary material)

While the Pixar animation Brave was itself properly researched and the archery was done mainly right in it, the same cannot be said from the official merchandise and other complementary material. I combined two pictures in this post, since I don't want to bother you with this crap many days in a row.

Mistakes:

A–picture is some awful little girly *SHINY* sticker ad, and the product includes 'horsies' and other glittering stuff those of us having two X-chromosomes, but not yet 10 years of age are supposed to like. Yuck!

1. The form of the string grip is awful too. It doesn't represent any of the several known grips which have been used historically around the World. This is just a fist around the string and arrow nock going somewhere. And look at the size of those tiny hands, they are almost smaller than her eyes (which are very big, a manga influence which rids popular culture these days)!
2. The bowstring goes OVER her bow arm!!! What in the actual ƒµ¢Í<?!? The maker of this picture has absolutely zero idea how to draw an archer, he or she has not used any reference at all. This is just the kind of ignorant shiny glittering *horsiepoop* which I absolutely hate! "I know how to draw everything, so I don't have to use reference, I just draw it out of my head." If you are too lazy to make a five second Google search before starting to draw (this is of course made with a computer, so the maker cannot excuse that it would take too much time to open the computer), you can as well change your career, from an "artist" to something which requires no use of brain cells, like a telemarketer, doorbell ringing Jehova's witness or a night club DJ.
3. There are other errors, like that the arrow doesn't rest on the bow gripping fist, so she has little control over where the arrow fill fly...
4. ...or the fact that the bow is held horizontally, which is very awkward and useless position...
5. ...and the nock of the arrow is nowhere near the archers face, where it should be...
6. ...or that she doesn't even look where she's aiming while she has already drawn the bow! But it would be frustratingly useless to correct those, as long as the whole form of the archer in this picture is so fundamentally wrong in every possible way. I remain wondering if Merida's dull facial expression in this picture is intentionally telling us: "I have absolutely no clue what I am doing, but I just keep this stupid smile on my face".

B–image on the other hand... I can't decide is it worse or on the same bottom pit as the picture A.
You couldn't get to a lower level in any other way than combining these two pictures. This is so poorly made unlucky attempt at depicting the character and the bow that I cannot continue without pausing to take a deep breath. I understand if many critics have drinking problems.

1. The bow in this picture does not bend. How hard it is to understand the difference between a bow and a slingshot? The former has a rigid string attached to a bending arc, and the latter has a stretching string fastened to a rigid frame. I'm sick of these rubber band bows, which would make better weapons if you'd throw the whole shebang at your enemy, instead of trying to shoot with it. I've drawn a proper curvature for the bow in blue.
2. The maker of this picture (I refuse to call these inferior cheap freelance draughtsmen artists) has succeeded in including two mistakes inside this circle. The archers hand is not gripping the string and arrow properly, the fingers just sort of lay there. Again, could've used some reference there, but no, too lazy to do that.
3. The other one is obvious too, the fletching of the arrow is way too back, since it interferes with the grip and the bowstring. This is actually the worst case of 'wayback fletching' I've seen so far, so, have ironic congrats for that, you the maker of this picture! Merida is holding the arrow from the middle of the fletching. This is so wrong it hurts!
4. The arrow is surprisingly on the left side of the bow as it should, but this is merely a coincidence, since the maker have had no idea of proper archery techniques at all. However the arrow tip weights half a kilogram since it's a solid iron tetrahedron of the size of half the fist. And it is not even located straight ahead of the arrow shaft, it's a little bit off the point.
5. Where on Earth is she looking at? Her head is completely sideways so she can't see at all the target where she's shooting at! Apparently the maker of this picture just had to include the 'pretty female face' in this ad in order to generate more clicks, but it just makes this picture look even more amateurish and downright stupid.
6. The line of sight and line of the arrow point in completely different directions. She would have no chance of hitting that large target which is three meters away, even if the line of the arrow would point anywhere near the target, which it doesn't do.

Good, but still not good:

Usually I would consider the use of hip quiver as a good point in a picture, but in these cases it is on the responsibility of Pixar's character designers, and the praise goes to them. Certainly the makers of these pictures would have drawn Merida with a back quiver, if they could've.

It's such a shame how the makers of these pictures have completely ruined everything which was good about the Character of Merida. She really knew how to shoot quite well in the movie, but in these pictures she is lowered to the level of millions of wrongly drawn archresses with ridiculously childish mistakes.

Brave (Pixar's)

A recently(ish) film by Pixar, Brave, features heavily archery. The story itself is good and I enjoyed it in the movies, but the setting, a medieval Scotland, is plagued by anachronistic stereotypes of scots invented in the Mel Gibson epic Braveheart. Since it's debut in 1995, every single "medieval" scottish cosplayer, picture or a movie character just has to have a kilt, and blue war paint on their face and body. The fact is that those two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other. And the blue paint nothing to do with scots either!

Picts (Picti, the name given by the Romans means 'painted folk') were the (possibly Celtic) people who used the blue war paint. They lived in Caledonia (from a name of one Pictish tribe Caledones) which was in the place of modern Scotland, at the late iron age, in Ancient time period, before Middle Ages.
Kilt on the other hand originates in the scottish highlands in the 16th century! That's modern age.

There's over a millennia between the use of the two, and they were/are used by a different people. Picts were no longer present at Caledonia when some pirates from Ireland – called Scots – came there, and gave the name for the modern country (not independent, still).

But now to the archery stuff!


Good:

The archery is extremely well presented in Brave-movie. The animators have really searched for proper historical and archerical reference, and actually used them in the final product. A thing rarely seen in other movies, so congratulations to Pixar for that! May it be because this is a computer animation, and other archery featuring movies are mainly made with real human actors, with a wide range of possible human errors in archery? An animation character can do things with a bow that a human cannot without proper training.
Meridas shooting form is almost perfect (as in picture C for example), the line of the arrow and the lines of both the arms are parallel as they should. She also has a hip quiver, which is very good!


Mistakes:

1. At least back in the days the English longbow (the second most overrated weapon after only 'Teh-Bestest-Eva-Katana') was the main choice of weapon for archer characters in movies. Nowadays the wages have turned in favour of a recurve bow, my favourite of the two main bow types. However, a recurve bow is primarily associated with either Eastern cultures (from Anatolia to Japan), or then Ancient peoples around the Mediterranean (Greeks, Romans etc.), while a longbow is quintessentially a Western European weapon, the most famous incarnation of it being the Welsh (English) longbow of the Middle Ages. In Brave, they had the perfect place to use the longbow, but instead they chose to give Merida a recurve bow. This is an error in my mind.
2. In the picture B can be seen a very strange thing, Meridas bow's lower limb has some stones tied to it! Why would that be, I have no idea. Completely useless and in fact a harmful idea, which makes the bow unnecessarily heavier. In other scenes the bows limbs have some strange discs attached to them, also with no use whatsoever.
3. In the screencapture C the fletching of the arrow is too back since it touches the string and the fingers of the archer. There should be more room after the nock of the arrow.
4. Most of the time Merida shoots with the bow vertically, like it is properly done, but in the picture D she shoots horizontally, a modern fashion style, which is thought to look 'cool', but it's only stupid. This movie almost avoided that cliché, but falls short here.