How not to draw an archer

This is both frustrating and alarming. Some guy has made a guide "how to draw an archer" and posted it on DeviantArt, which is notoriously infamous for promoting only lousy unoriginal plagiaristic fan "art" and softcore porn classified under "nude art photography".

This guide is unfortunately completely wrong. Someone has actually took the time to make this "guide" for other people to teach them how to draw archers wrong! Why would anyone do this if they have no idea how a bow works? What made them think that they had the expertise to make themselves an authority on the subject? That is beyond my comprehension.

This is a very bad guide, which should be removed permanently from internet. If you want to learn how to draw an archer who's anatomy is way off (proper height of an adult human would be seven and half times the height of the head, and here it is nine!) which uses a bow that doesn't bend, with a rubber band attached to it, then you can use this one. Otherwise, please use photographs of real archers instead.


Mistakes:

1. The bow doesn't bend here! It is not the string which stretches, but the bow's arc which creates the power to propel the arrow. How is this hard to see? I've drawn a box around the bow in the first picture. The bow arc should bend to the middle of that box, while the string should be at the end of the box. Arrow half way in the middle. Yes, Japanese kyudo bows, which this tries to depict are sometimes even two meters long (daikyu), and their upper limb is much longer that the lower limb, but that doesn't change the principle of bow arcing. Draw the rectangular box around the place where the drawn bow will be, then make a line in the middle. Other side draw the bent bow and other side the string. It's very easy to draw a realistic bow with this method.
2. This picture is drawn after some photographs of kyudo archers, but disappointingly the maker of this picture hasn't noticed the mistakes he made with the bow. Also he hasn't looked the arrow close enough to see that his is wrong. There are again no room for fingers to hold the arrow nock behind the fletching. There should be some 3 cm space there. This figure also has only one spare arrow and not a quiver. I don't consider it a new mistake in this case, since the maker of this picture has just copied it from the photographs he has seen, and kyudo archers do hold one spare arrow in their drawing hand like this and not always carry a quiver. This is of course sports archery, in war japanese would use quivers too, like everybody else who has any brain cells in their cranium.

Good:

Nothing. It's especially harmful to make a guide of how to do something, when you have no idea how it's properly done. Teaching erroneous things is wrong! It's also misleading to call this just a guide how to draw 'an archer'. This should be called (if made properly) "how to draw a Japanese kyudo archer". Since kyudo is a sport and has very little to do with archery in warfare. Also Japanese archery is very different from archery in anywhere else in the world because of the unusual shape and size of the bows.

Lars Andersen part 2: myths of archery

Lars Andersen performing a bow trick.

Almost immediately when Lars Andersen's speed shooting video went viral, there emerged one and another column of criticism on different newspapers and web sites, written usually by self-claimed, but still unnamed, "archery experts", who angrily (and quite enviously) bashed his techniques, claimed them being nothing more than circus tricks, useless in warfare, and even accused him of 'distortion of history', a pretty serious claim with only misunderstandings backing it.

I want to correct those now. If you still haven't seen Andersen's amazing skills on video, you can find it in my last post in this blog.

Back quiver, a Hollywood myth, persisting over nine decades!

Those envy "experts" misunderstood the point clearly stated in Andersen's video, that back quivers weren't really used much at all in history, since they are very impractical. They thought that Andersen meant that quivers weren't used at all, then making obvious statements, that "no one would carry twenty to forty arrows in their hands". Of course not. Of course quivers were used. The thing was: quivers weren't used on back. That's the Hollywood myth, which they think looks 'cool', and because of that, every modern archer wants to replicate that and keep their arrows on their back. They probably haven't even tried to use hip quivers, although they would be much more practical, easier and faster to use.

Medieval longbowman with a proper hip quiver.

Another point was made about 'distortion of history', which is a crappy statement. Andersen claimed that the techniques he have discovered and practised have been lost in time for quite some time. This is in fact true. The "experts" claimed that these techniques were only lost in Europe, but not in Asia, where they would still prevail even today. I would like to ask these "experts", how many cultures in Asia still wage war, or even hunt, with traditional bows? I give you the answer too: zero! Also Andersen's techniques are based on Saracen archery, and Saracen (a generic term for arabic muslims in late Midde Ages) culture exists no more (replaced by muslim culture and different national identities, certainly the art of fast archery has been lost until now).

The "experts" gave as an example some traditional Japanese archery (kyudo) practised today. But the thing is: kyudo is a martial art, a sport, not a way of fighting in a war! These are two completely different things. In kyudo the archers use a long time for aiming each shot, and accuracy is the main goal in it. They are not fighting against an enemy, who would try to kill them. Also, sport bows are only half as powerful as war bows would be. That means they require much less force, and they can be held longer in the full drawn aiming position. With a real war bow, an archer doesn't really "aim" with the arrow, he knows where it will go when he releases, he just draws quickly and releases immediately (because with a powerful war bow the full draw requires immense amount of strength and if someone tries to aim with a full draw, their hands will get shaky and the arrow will fly off the target).

A modern Japanese kyudo archer holds his arrows on his back, not in a full quiver, but in a very small quiver called yebira, which doesn't hold the arrow shafts as tightly as a western full quiver, and actually the arrows can be drawn from the side, not from behind a shoulder, like in movies.

A historical kyudo archer. Japanese archery is based on wholly different techniques than European or Saracen archery, which Lars Andersen represents.