If you'd spent that time it took to grow that hair to practise archery, you'd be good already

This stance is entirely wrong. I see this a lot in beginners. The back should be more straight and the shoulder blades pulled together so that the chest muscles are opened more. Shoulders need to align with the arrow a lot more than this, the head should be kept straight on top of the spine, no need to cant it like this for aiming. You don't need to look down the arrowshaft, the aiming should be instictive. Of course it needs training, but who said archery is going to be easy? When you just learn not to lock your bowarm's elbow you won't even need the overly large arm guard anymore.

Stock photo archeress

I have nothing to say to this picture, other than mistakes of course:

1. This elbow should be pointing back and not to the side.

2. Sideways shooting. Now somebody is going to comment that canting the bow like this is possible. Yes it is, but why? There is no obstacles that would make it necessary in this image.

3. Beginner's mistake: keeping the index finger above the arrow.

4. No quivers were harmed during this photoshoot.

Note:
She has a strange grip of the arrow. It's not the traditional European "Mediterranean" grip, nor the widespread Asian "Mongolian" thumb grip. But it is a real grip, a pinching grip, although relatively rare one. It is used by some natives, and presumably ancient people's of Europe. It's really hard and requires a lot of finger muscles for the pinching, which this girl obviously doesn't have. But in this case it doesn't bother her since this bow (if it is even a bow and not a stick with a string) has about 10 pounds of draw weight.

The new Tomb Raider cosplay

Nice Lara Croft cosplay, but the archery should use some work.

Mistakes:

1. This elbow (of her right arm) should point higher up and backwards from the arrowshaft, not to the ground like this.

2. This elbow should not be bent in like this, it will lead to the bowstring hitting the forearm. The bow arm doesn't need to be exactly straight, just a little bit bent.

3. Take the forefinger off from the top of the arrow. It will hurt in release.

4. Three fingers are enough for the Mediterranean draw, four in unnecessary and might hamper the shot.

5.This bow is crooked (the upper limb in this photo should turn right and not left), and I believe it's not a real bow, but just a cosplay prop.

Neutral:
The quiver is okay. It's ugly, but Lara is supposed to make it herself in the bushes or something. And it's more of a hip quiver than a back quiver, so that's something I like.

Avatar cosplay

This time reviewing archery of some Avatar cosplays I came across from the Internet. No more Avatar related stuff for awhile after this, I promise.
This first one should really use a real bow. This is a stick with a string. It obviously doesn't bend since she cannot present a full draw. But what would be the point anyway, if she doesn't have an arrow? The leather bracer is on the wrong arm too. Did Na'vi use sandals by any chance?

How did they get leopard print in Pandora? I don't think leopards live there. And what's with those flip flops? The bow is again just a stick with a string, not a reall working weapon. Arrows are missing again. And that's an uncomfortable place to wear your knife!

 I always appreciate good body paint over printed leotards. What I would also appreciate is using a straight arrow. This is a branch taken out of a bush when lining into Comic-Con. Please buy a wooden dowel from a hardware store next time, doesn't cost much. Sideways shooting is also bad.

This seems like a real photographer took it, maybe not the best one, but someone who really hobbies it with a real camera and all. Sadly the bow is horrible, and even more horrible is the way she's holding it. she should've grabbed the bow one fist width higher. This is really bad for the wrist too. The drawing technique is different from the Na'vi of the film.

What's with this leopard print again!?!
This bow is a cosplay bow, cannot shoot arrows very far. The usual mistakes of cosplay bows apply here: handle and mid part are too long and unbendy. She's holding the arrow between the fingers of her bow hand, which is very bad. That will hurt a lot when the arrow is released. Or would if the bow would have any power. Which it clearly doesn't since she only use the tiniest amount of strength of her fingertips to draw the bow in this photo. The drawing technique is different from the movie and she's shooting right handed unlike the Na'vi.

I saved the worst technique last. From the same photoshoot than the previous picture comes this monstrosity. The bowstring goes OVER the bowarm here. That is wrong on so many levels I can't bring myself even to begin the sermon all over again. I've talkerd about it many times before, this is one of the worst mistake you can do. Usually I see it depicted on drawings, rarely if ever by real people, since it will hurt a lot when you release that string and it hits your forarm. But then again this cosplay bow is not meant for shooting anyway and doesn't hold any real power. Sideways shooting is wrong anyway. Suddenly she's left handed for this photo, mirrored image perhaps?

That's not the way to string a bow

 

A Spanish (probably they want to call themselves Catalonians) historical reenactment group called Barcino Oriens who try to recreate imperial Roman army and civilian life in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE does a very poor job of representing archery. And when I say very poor, I mean absolutely abysmal.

It should be a crime to teach something if you have absolutely no clue of what you are talking about. This man here shows how he thinks a bow is stringed. This is not how it's done. That is utterly and completely wrong and he is plain ignorant about it. It is totally impossible to shoot that way, and if it would be a real bow (I mean not made of plastic), and if he somehow got the string to keep in place while drawing, the bow could break. Fortunately the string will slip off of the bow nocks if he tried to pull the string that way.

I of course commented on that, since it was on Facebook, and I like to educate people. The answer was as usual, hostile:

"Imposible! It's only one way this!" is barely an understandable sentence. I know their native language is Catalan, and not English, but neither is mine. The laughing smiley (I heard the diginatives call them emojis nowadays, but I still call them smileys) is by my (bow shooting) friend.

I patiently gave them an explanation in pictures, since if we don't have a common language, that should work:

I just posted it, so I'm now waiting for their answer, probably tomorrow we'll see. Maybe I'll update this post, but probably I have better things to do.

I don't want to comment on the quality of their reenactment, since it's not the subject of this blog (maybe I'll start another one in the future?), but let's just say that if Catalonia did separate from Spain, we would not lose much.

UPDATE

They deleted their picture without any comment. I hope they learned their lesson.

UPDATE

They answered me later in Facebook, and it seems that they learned how to string a bow. Nice to see that I taught somebody to do it right.

Does anorexia lead you to lumbar lordosis?

This anorexia promotion disguised as fashion photography has some major issues with archery as well. On to the mistakes:

1. The Mediterranean draw uses three fingers to draw the bowstring, not four like here. A beginners mistake.

2. The arm should point backwards from the direction of the arrow. Lifting the elbow too high wastes a lot of energy. A beginners mistake.

3. This arrow is way too long for this woman. All the arrowshaft coming in front of the bow in a full draw is wasted material. Overly long arrows were in fact used, but only in hunting, and usually fishing, by some native tribes, for example in Amazonian rainforest. Which is by the way burning at the moment. Horrible! But to this European medieval shooting style overly long arrows do not belong.

4. Arching her back like this is not a good form for archery, or anything else than looking sexy in a photograph. Archers did indeed lean forward in the middle ages, but it involves hip hinging, and the back should be straight, not arched like you had a lumbar lordosis. Even when doing archery, the back is not supposed to be arched!

5. No other arrows anywhere to be seen tells that this model has just been given a bow and one arrow and she has never held a bow in her hand before.

By the way, the faux leather can't cover the fact that this bow is entirely modern in its construction.

Larp ranger showing of her modern shoes

I almost feel bad about criticizing this one. It is a promotional photo from my absolute favourite soleplaying convention in Finland. This might be a person I have actually met, but probably not. Remember folks that this is nothing personal, just business.

Mistakes:

1. The positioning of the wrist like this is the exact reason you need that leather bracer to protect your arm when the bowstring hits it every single time you shoot. Keeping the arm and wrist more straigh of bending slightly outwards, not inwards like here, keeps the arm out of harms way and the bracer is not even needed.

2. There is way too much of this arrow on this side of the bow, meaning that the draw is not full. Why wouldn't you shoot with full force, wasting the power of the arrow like this makes it fly less than it could.

3. Arrows on the back in a quiver that looks more like a sleeping blanket rolled and tied onto a backpack or something.

This is by no means the worst I've seen, but better luck next time still!

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.

This is a curved stick, not a bow.

This seems like a princess cosplay of sorts. But with a bow. Or rather a stick with a string. It looks sad, sorry to say.

Mistakes:

1. This looks horrible, the elbow of the string arm should point backwards, not sideways like here. This is especially bad technique which results when a person doesn't know she should use more her back muscles for the draw and not just the arms. It would matter if she would have a real bow, with this toy she's not going to break herself, but it's still bad technique.

2. The bending of the elbow of the bow arm is also wrong. Bending it inward like this is a good way to get the arm bruised with the bowstring. It would matter if she had a real bow with actual poundage, not so much with this cosplay prop.

3. Mediterranean grip is done with three fingers, not four.

4. The arrow only has two flethcings, it should have three. They also seem to be too far back since they touch the fingers.

5. And now the bow. This isn't one. This is a stick with something hot glued on it for decorations. Then there's some string hastily tied to it. It wouldn't shoot, it's a curved stick, not a bow. Get a real bow next time please, this is fooling nobody.

Only thing flying is her hair

Another, more professional looking photoshoot. I could say something about La Roux wanting her hair back, and I already did, so let's get to mistakes then:

1. Gripping the bowstring with the whole fist is a clear mark of someone who has never held a bow in their life before and were not instructed at all how to use it. It is funny, did the photographer just ask for a model and someone to lend them the bow without anyone who actually knows how to shoot at present? Looks like it. Would they do the same with a gun? What about a car (lending it for a photoshoot, nobody actually knowing how to drive, and the end result looking comical)?

2. Another beginners mistake, holding the arrow with their index finger. Nope.

3. The arrow has a terrible fletching, looks more like fly fishing lure than fletching of an arrow.

4. The bow is also ugly. Is it covered in scales or something? It looks too bulky and stiff. On the other hand those tufts on the ends of the bow are okay, some indigenous archers in the Americas for example used those kind of decorations on their bows.

5. No other arrows or a quiver anywhere to be seen. But maybe she should get clothes first, and worry about a quiver after that.

How easy it is to find good reference pictures of archery in Google?

After searching for archery pictures from Baidu in the last post, I got thinking that surely it must be easier to find good reference photos from Google, right?

So I of course did the search.

First with "archer". But because of the popularity of the comedic series of the same name (should I watch it by the way, some say it's hilarious?), sadly finding any real archer pictures turns out impossible. Even with excluding words such as "series" and "episode" in the same Google search (You did know you can do it? Just put a minus sign before a word you want to exclude from search results, really helpful sometimes!).

Secondly with "archery". That turned out only modern Olympic archery photos, as expected.

Third time with "medieval archer". That search gave some good illustrations. Obviously not many photographs. Even a period source (medieval artwork) in the front page, which is good. But the first two results are quite bad and the quality changes significantly from picture to picture.

Next I tested with "historical archer", which yielded better results. Some historical photos of archers from Manchuria and Mongolia turned out, which are good reference for Eastern archery. Only one photo of a medieval longbowman reenactor. And our friend Lars Andersen in the second picture of the page! Unfortunately his bow there isn't very historical.

After that, a search with "bowman", which was a disappointment. Mainly random pictures of people with Bowman as their surname, as well as some pictures of Bard the Bowman from the Hobbit film trilogy. Other bowmen were from games, comics, and movies too.

Finally "longbowman" game some better results if one wants to draw aEuropean medieval archer. Longbows were pretty common in Europe in the middle ages, but of course other types of bows were used also. Use of the longbows also certainly didn't restrict to England or Wales, but they were used all Europe, and even the World. Results were varied also in this last search, with some inaccurate game pictures muddying the waters.

Turns out it wasn't so easy to find a good reference picture, preferably a photo, of a traditional (read = medieval European) archer using Google after all. Maybe reenactors should put much more pictures up there to give better picture search results. For the betterment of depiction of archery in public imagination as well as popular culture!

How to find good photo reference of archery in China?

I actually got interested after the last post, what kind of results the "Chinese Google" Baidu gives for "archer". Since Google is seriously restricted in some aspects in China. I don't for a second believe that those who can use Google in China couldn't use it to search pictures of archers, but many people might actually prefer Baidu for reason or another. And it's interesting to see what results that search engine gives, if some Chinese person would like to get some photo references for an archer drawing.

And the results are quite surprising.
First I searched with the English word "archer" in Baidu. It gave only images from some archer anime. Not good for reference.

Next I searched with a Chinese word 射箭运动员 which apparently means an archer. It gave photos of Olympic archers. Those are not good for reference if you would like to draw a historical archer, since modern sports bows don't like like traditional bows at all.

After that I used another Chinese word I got from an online dictionary for archer: 弓箭手. That gave a page full of very inaccurate fantasy drawings of archers. Not a single realistic one which could be used as a reference, and not a single photograph. All were these ridiculous game character concept art things.

So it turns out one does not easily found good photo reference of traditional archery in China, at least if you use Baidu! Or then I just don't know the right words to use in a Chinese language search.

Glamour archery, not very glamorous

These are some glamour or fashion photgraphy shots of fashion models holding bows and arrows. Obviously they've never held a bow before and neither had the photographer or anyone else who was present. These are so bad that it hurts my eyes, glamour is million miles away from these photos. The looks and stances are not gracious, they look painful and deformed! You can even break your body if you shoot as wrong as these models, so don't do it.

The first to photos have exactly the same mistakes:
1. The line I've drawn there should be straight. Straight! These are like zig-zagged spirals. The string arm (right arm) should be much higher, parallel to the bow arm. Elbows of these women are pointing downwards, when they should be pointing straight to the back. All the power for the draw has now to be generated with the arm, which is a waste of energy. Instead the power should be generated from the bigger back muscles, as well as the arms (both of them).
2. The whole body of both of these women is twisted ina a deformed position. The pelvis is facing forward, when it should be facing sideways. The upper body, especially shoulders have the same problem. It is not possible to shoot like this. Why are they also leaning backwards so much, it doesn't look glamorous?
3. The third picture has some other mistakes. There are lines already, so I didn't have to draw them on the picture. The arrow should go on the same line as the arms. Now it does not. It's impossible to aim if the arrow and arms do not line. The grip of the arrow is very gentle, looks like this bow is nota bow but just a stick that bends and a string attached to it. The "arrow" (another stick) is also missing fletching, and its tip cannot be seen. Pelvis of this bow holding photo model is also towards front, which is wrong, as said already.

Keep your bow arm straight!

I have something to say about this photo, which is photographically quite decent (although strange place to focus, instead of the face or the arrow tip for example).

The form of the bow arm is not good on her. It goes like a zig-zag. It should ba as straight as possible. Simple as that. The wrist and elbow are now bent inwards, which results in the forearm being too close to the bowstring. That's why beginners need those bracers on the inside of their bowarm, since they bend their wrist and elbow in a way that exposes the inside of the forearm to the moving string. That's bad technique, and won't be corrected by using a bracer. Instead I embrace not using a bracer and soon an archer learns not to bend the forearm in the way of the string. Pain teaches.

There is very little amount of historical archer's bracers found. If everybody would have used them, there should be way more. Also they are depicted very scarcely on period artwork. They were sometimes used, but weren't widespread by any means. Since most archers knew how to shoot without hitting their forearm with every release.

There's something odd about the new Hunger Games poster

This ad catched my 26-year old (young?) eyes in a newspaper recently, and I just had to make a post about it.

What is so irritating about it?
Is it the fact that this mediocre youngsters book series is turned into a hugely popular money-making movie machine?
Is it that they just had to turn a trilogy into a tetralogy (more correct term than quadrilogy, based on Greek rather than Latin in this case), that the last book just had to be made into two separate movies, like they did with other (much better, in my opinion) youngsters book series turned into a film series (including wizards if you didn't guess already)?
Is it the amount of liquify they used to make Jennifer Lawrences waist a tiny bit thinner and her legs more than a tiny bit longer?
Is it the cheapest of cheap looking graphical device of flames surrounding everything?
Is it the very much overused font choice of Bank Gothic, the "standard movie font when you have no imagination at all"?

It isn't even all those things together. But it's the archery, or the lack of it for that matter. Let me delve with you deeper into the more or less mystical aspects of bowmanship (or bowwomanship?), with my usual list of...

Mistakes:

1. The biggest mistake here is that there wasn't actually a bow present in the shooting of this photograph! From the very first look at this poster the whole thing seemed more than a bit off. It was unnerving to me and when I looked closer I realised that the odd feeling came from the fact that the bow in this photo is computer generated. How do I know this? From several reasons: the arms of Ms. Lawrence look very relaxed, the muscles are not stretched and the fingers don't seem to hold anything with a firm grasp. She might have had something in her left hand though, but nothing in her right, it seems. Why would they do that? Because they are idiots who think that nothing is perfect enough if it's not made with computer (ahem... late career Peter Jackson complex). But it's just horrible, and doesn't look real at all.
2. The second mistake is also the mistake of the guy who generated the computer bow for this. When we draw a rectangle around the bow (any type of bow) the ears of the bent bow should reach the middle point of the rectangle. One half for bow, the other half for string. Then the bow is properly made (or drawn, with a pen that is, or computer). This bow has too short string, or then it bends too much. In either case the bow ears bend over the middle of the box I've drawn around it. The little white arrows show the places where the bows each end should reach while it is fully drawn.
3. Another mistake by the CGI guy, who apparently didn't look very closely to a real bow while attempting to create one. The bowstring is not attached to the nocks of the bow! This looks ridiculous and is bad since you wouldn't be able to shoot with it, and even if you would, it would make the shot less powerful, since now not all the power of the bow is harnessed by the string. The little green arrow shows the point of the nock on the bow, where the string should be attached.
4. Beginners mistake (still Jennifer, still this one after several archery movies you've been in?) of keeping forefinger above the arrow. It should hold there with gravity and your fist below it. If not, something else is wrong with the position of your hand, but putting a finger around it won't help that, it just makes it painful to shoot since the fletching of the arrow will hit your fingers. It can also affect the flight of the missile, and damage the fletching.
5. She has three fingered archery gloves designed for Mediterranean grip, which is the standard in Europe (and western world) anyway, but she is only using two fingers to draw the bowstring. Why is that? Just another CGI mistake perhaps?
6. The hand (and string and arrow) is not quite high enough, it should be closer to her mouth. But the photography director has obviously commanded her to keep it lower in order for all the people to see her lips. Womans luscious red lips have to be seen always, that's the Rule I-don't-know-which-number in the books of movie makers.
7. Where are her arrows? Of course she didn't have a quiver, if she didn't even have bow the day they photoshooted, but should the CGI-guy have put it on her later? Can't shoot much without arrows you know.
8. This stance. It's not a stance. It's a jump. You can't shoot properly while jumping if you're not Lars-Andersen-level-archer. Which Katniss is not. Aim would be terrible.

Good:
Her arms form a nice parallel line with the arrow, which is always good. But that should also always be expected of every archer on the planet.

Terrible Hobbit dwarf cosplayers

Two more Kili's this time!
Both are cosplayers who try to be the archer dwarf from The Hobbit movie trilogy, both are obviously girls, and neither of them can shoot with a bow and arrow.

First I'd like to address something relating to cosplay. Why is it so that all the Kili cosplayers I've seen on the Internet have been female, trying to be the male dwarf, glueing or painting some stubble on their chins? That does not look remotely real or believable. Everyone notices right away that they are not men. Male and female physique is quite different and the smaller jaw usually exposes the female gender easily, if nothing else (like the obviously female haircut in the B picture, or the makeup). And if the human inside the character speaks, the play is over.

Cosplay is one of my hobbies too, as well as costume and prop making. I just can't understand why it's premarily a female hobby, at least in Finland where I live. Most of the people in conventions who have dressed in costumes are women. Men tend to be more interested in gaming (traditional and video). Another question is, even though there wouldn't be enough men willing to cosplay some male characters, do women really have to cosplay them? There are plenty of female characters out there to cosplay, even if we rule out all the sexist and stupid 80 percent of them!
And then there's genderbending, even though I'm not the greatest fan of it, but if you really must play as a character of the opposite gender, can't you adjust the costume to your own? Just with a little bit of imagination you can make the role yours. Women can make female versions of male characters, be just as happy cosplaying them (if not happier, since it requires less tied breasts and glued stubble on face), and look cool and inspiring instead of obviously fake and ridiculous.


But now to the mistakes in these girls' archery, if it could even be called that.

A

1. Sideways shooting. One of the worst mistakes you can make. Enough said of it already in the previous posts.
2. What is this bow supposed to be made of? Looks like plastic and cardboard to me, but it might imitate wood and bronze. Anyway, if it would be bronze, it would be too heavy, cumbersome and unbendable to actualy work well.
3. The arrow is on the wrong side of the bow. This is the most common mistake seen in this blog's examples of crap archery. How she think the arrow keeps there? She has to literally hold it between her fingers, unless it would drop to the ground! Did the thought not cross her mind to maybe put the arrow on the other side of the bow? No? Okay, terrible. You just failed your basic archery course.
4. Four finger grip around the string. Not necessary and quite amateurish.
5. These little arrows and the dashed line show the two points where the bowstring bends. Because she's shooting stupidly sideways, the position of the drawing hand is unnatural and results in the bending of the string. It is true that you can bend the string sideways like this to give the arrow and extra spin in direction or another, but that is super high skill level precision archery stuff, not for the novices in these pictures.
6. The larger opaque white arrows show the direction of her arms. And they are not anywhere near where they should be. The biggest problem is again the sideways shooting, which results in a very poor shooting form, and the arms are just all around the place.
7. This arrowhead is not sharp. What are you trying to do, knock someone out? Or hunt squirrels without damaging their fur? I doubt that. It's also too big and heavy for this arrow (if the tip would be made of metal. I bet this foam tipped "arrow" flies as good as a foam tipped "arrow" can, which is probably below ten meters).
8. This mock of an arrow doesn't have proper fletching, what a surprise! Two feathers in terrible condition instead of three good ones. Nice job there.

B

1.  I just ended up lining this whole figure, since everything about this form and holding of the bow tells me that this person has never hold a proper bow in her life, let alone shoot with it. It's like she's holding a delicate crystal goblet full of red wine, in a pure white silk dress, walking on killer high heels on a slippery wet marble floor. That's not the way to hold a bow and arrow. That should be like a lumberjack and his trustworthy double-bitted felling axe, not just with brute force, but with firm hand and expert's preciseness, every hit of the axe splitting a log in two perfectly balanced halves, never hitting a rock or his own leg.
2. Maybe she wasn't holding the bow properly because it's not a proper bow! Or then not. Anyway, the bow is a toy. With a bow this thin you can create enough energy to maybe get an arrow stuck in a dartboard, if the arrow is sharp enough. With a real war bow you (well, not you, but a professional ancient or medieval archer) would hit right through the wall behind the dartboard and nail a guy hiding behind it.
3. Arrow. On. The. Wrong. Side. Of. The. Bow. Again, she has to use her thumb to keep it there.
4. These transparent big white arrows show the position of her arms. They are again a mess (and covered in obvious plastic foam!), and even though she hasn't made the full draw yet, I bet my head that her arms aren't aligned when she does that. A novice just don't get it right without proper instructor.
5. The cock feather (red one in here) should point towards the face of the archer, not outwards. That's because the two other fletches (which are opposite to each other) then pass the arc of the bow without touching it and thus damaging the fletches.

That's for today. I have nothing good to say about these "archery" pictures.

Elf woman in photograph

What's wrong with this picture? It's a woman dressed up in a fantasy costume, I don't know if she's cosplaying any character, probably just a regular cliché'd female elf archer, which the fantasy worlds are always full of.

Mistakes:
There's really only one. The stance. Why is she crouching like that and thus holding her bow diagonally? That archery form is not really good. Her stance would be much more solid if she would stand on her two legs, back straight and all. She's also aiming very low, is her enemy coming out of water? A watergoblin (Vesihiisi, like we say in Finland)?
There seem to be a small trend that regue-like characters have to crouch when shooting with a bow, and actually, they must be in crouching position at all times, whatever they're doing. In games like the Elder Scrolls series, when player crouches, he/she gets more power out of his/her bow. That's so horribly wrong! The power of the draw actually weakens if you crouch and hold your bow horizontally, like they do in Elder Scrolls games.

Good:
Her archery form is otherwise good. I just see no point of being crouched, and even on so slippery surface. There would be a much better place for shooting a few steps back, not in the wet stones of the riverbank.