Hello there,

Yep id shot standard (non-compound) bows for years as a kid, and still own several working crossbows :)

Actually proper bowmanship was a big concern in this render. I went into it with the following assumptions for the character:

As a centaur, she would have little to no ability to rotate her human hips/waist. probably much less than 45 degrees

As most fantasy renders involve healthy chested female creatures, She would have no choice as a warrior but to adapt the weapons of the time to her build. I was always taught as a right handed male individual (from school P.E. teachers, and bow enthusiasts, but never liscensed professional instruction) to stand exactly 90 degrees to my target, left side forward, feet in line pointed directly at target, string drawn to right ear, and to sight along the length of the arrow shaft. Obviously a full breated woman couldnt do this without shearing off a breast! In a top view of this render, she has her left arm a few degrees off instead of in a straight angle off her shoulder, and her right hand holds the string a bit away from the chest, with the bow angled. Obviously this is an unaimed shot, Ive assumed shes spent her life developing a "point shooting" technique for targets to her flank where she learned which pre determined distance that her arrow would intersect with at center from her custom bowgrip, and learning how to adjust it for shorter or longer shots.

Assuming her lack of twist at the waist, I had the idea that as she was pursuing them from behind, her bow was directly to her 12:00, and when the birds abruptly winged up and to the left, she followed her target by turning her neck and shoulders, moving the bow about 90 degrees to her left, to her 9:00, and also going from a horizontal to a verticle bow position, which would have been an emulation of the "human stance" as far as her shoulders and forlegs aligned to the shot. My idea is that when she is galloping and targetting anything right in front of her, her shoulders are squared to her target, not in line with them, and the bow is possibly held horizontally rather than vertically and nock drawn to just below her eye.

A lot of the ideas for her bow handling came from an old marvel Conan story where he met an amazon that was such a dedicated warrior, that she hacked off her own left breast to be able to shot "properly". I really didnt want to edit the uh....superstructure of this model that drastically, so I used top view to set an angle where the arrow was going to intersect that bird (gave a few feet of lead as the target was in motion).

As far as the hair, I really wanted to give her black hair for exactly the reasons you mentioned, but it tended to get lost in the branches behind her and the beautiful roar hair pose became impossible to appreciate. I went for a blond that seemed to be similar to the golden/tan of her main coat.

Does any of this sound logical or am I totally graspin at straws here?

Logan