We are down to the last week in the Great Pirate Paint Off contest! It’s time to get your last projects finished up and entered as the contest ends at the end of the day, Sunday, May 14th.
If you’re just discovering the contest, this is a low-key painting event for the Firelock pirate community. The goal is to get inspire each other to get those minis painted! There is a variety of prizes to be handed out during and after the contest for various community members and sponsoring vendors, so great paint jobs count for something, but the main point is to share our work and inspire each other to build up our new minis and get them ready for the table!
You can find complete details and rules for the contest here on the Great Pirate Paint Off home page.
(Note: in the interest of some level of anonymity for the final voting later in the Spring, we are not including painters’ names on photos going forward, except in the case of various prizes awarded during the contest.)
Participation
At our last update we had 180 logged entries and as of today we are at exactly 200! That number was our goal for this first year of this painting contest and we hit it one week early! I’m hopping to we can get another 30 entries this week for a strong finish.
We are up to 60 different contestants in the event with new people joining every week. We had a couple new folks enter a bunch of miniatures this week.
Types of Entries
There are several different categories to enter in this contest. Right now the Unit and Commander categories have the most entries while the Oak & Iron and Force categories are pretty light so far!
- 76 Units
- 61 Commanders
- 19 Characters
- 15 Ships
- 13 Terrain
- 10 Forces
- 6 Oak & Iron Ships
The Terrain category had another big boost this week. Check out some of the various terrain pieces people submitted this week:
If you haven’t already, check out Dexter’s terrain building challenged he’s hosting as part of this contest over on YouTube.
Oak & Iron got one more entry this week, but still is the lowest participation category so far.
Nations Represented
The national rivalry that is part of the Summer of Plunder starts now! The Pirates surged to first place, surpassing the Spanish who got no support at all this week! The English had a good week as well, almost catching the Spanish who took the early lead.
- 42 Pirate
- 34 Spanish
- 33 English
- 18 French
- 16 Dutch
- 3 Native American
If you want to maximize your chances of winning something, get those native models painted! Only 3 entries so far!
Random Prize Winner
This week Julian Jerry Kegley has been selected as the random winner to receive a little “mid contest prize” of a restrike of a 1731 Spanish 8 Reale coin. Jerry entered a whole batch of painted minis and terrain this week, including some great pirate commanders.
We’ll be doing one more random giveaway of another Fortune Coin to one of the entries submitted this next coming week.
Contest Sponsor Spotlight – Tales of the Sail
In every update, we’d like to highlight one of the contest’s sponsors. This week we’d like to draw your attention to the Tales of the Sail podcast. Tales of the Sail has been a core of the Blood & Plunder community for several years now, but if you’re just starting to play you may not have seen their work yet.
Tales of the Sail has been publishing podcast episodes since December of 2019, focusing primarily on Blood & Plunder, but also covering Oak & Iron, some of Firelock’s other games, and various digressions into other game systems, Model UN, hobby farming and fiber fairs.
You can find the 35 published episodes of Tales of the Sail podcast under the No Dice, No Glory feed on iTunes, Spotify or their website.
Not only are they a podcast, but they have been community leaders through hosting various tournaments at conventions or even fancy destination events, and facilitating a regular paint night for hobbyists to connect and chat while working on projects. If you haven’t already, you should join the No Dice, No Glory Discord server and drop in on the next monthly Friday night paint night. Always some fun discussions!
You will occasionally find a helpful article related to Blood & Plunder on the No Dice, No Glory blog, either written by one of the hosts, or Mitch Reed, NDNG’s main man. They recently published an article on selecting the ship that might be best for you in Blood & Plunder.
Current hosts of Tales of the Sail include Tom Mullane and Glenn Van Meter and Tyler of Dead Man’s Chest is a previous host.
You can easily find everything the are doing by going to their Facebook page which will have links to episodes, articles and event pages for the next paint night.
Tales of the Sail is hosting the Blood & Plunder tournaments at Historicon this year in July!
Final Thoughts
We’ve only got one week left! Get those entries in! The contest will close on May 14th, then take a day or two to select some finalists for the public voting that will run through May 28th. Watch here on Blood & Pigment for a page to cast votes for your favorite entries.
Gallery of New Entries
Here are the new entries since last week. If you want to see all the entries so far, check out the complete gallery.
