The entry period is over for the Great Pirate Paint Off contest for Blood & Plunder and Oak & Iron and voting is ongoing for the People’s Choice Awards. In this post we’ll be awarding some of the other prizes! There will be one final post for this contest on June 4th or 5th, awarding the People’s Choice prizes.

Summer of Plunder Commander Prizes

In this first category, we had our several Commanders for the upcoming Summer of Plunder Campaign event select their favorite entry from their nation’s submissions. Winners will all receive a Blood & Plunder storage box with their nation’s flag engraved on the lid, supplied for this contest by Things from the Basement.

Commander’s Choice Pirate Entry

Gregory Padilla, the Pirate Commander for this year’s Summer of Plunder had lots of great pirate entries to choose from in this contest! Ultimately, he chose this stunning pirate crew by Ryan Peterson.

Stede Bonnet and crew complete with pirate flag!

Commander’s Choice Spanish Entry

Garrett Swader, this year’s Spanish Commander selected this outstanding Spanish Force by Fernando Arteaga for the prize winning Spanish entry.

Fernando painted up not one, but TWO entire Spanish forces during this contest. This “Far Flung Outpost” style force, and a full fledged Spanish Army Force as well.

Commander’s Choice English Entry

Jayden King, commander for the English this year, selected this impressive English Force painted by Jake Farris. Jake painted a lot of beautiful minis over the course of this contest and took some amazing pictures.

Here are some more of Jake’s miniatures from this event.

Commander’s Choice French Entry

Andy Hodges, this year’s French Commander, selected this French Commander model painted by Julian Nault. Julian painted up a fantastic French Force and this commander has some serious “French Style” going on here.

Check out that pattern painted on the coat. Amazing work.

Here are some more shots of Julian’s French Force.

Commander’s Choice Dutch Entry

Maarten de Kruif, a genuine Dutchman serving as our Dutch Commander this year, selected this set of Zeelieden by Ryan Peterson as the Dutch winner.

Ryan has a great eye for color combinations and entered several great sets of minis, all cleanly photographed. A well deserved win, for both the Dutch and Pirate categories!

Commander’s Choice Native American Entry

The Native American factions don’t get enough love in this game. But we had a few great entries! David Boeren, our Native American Commander for the Summer of Plunder, chose this mini by Bartosz Nowecki.

Bartosz submitted a couple excellent native models:

Most Entries

Now we’re on to the other awards!

With 24 entries totaling 42 painted models and some terrain, Kyle Arpke took the prize for most entries in The Great Pirate Paint Off. Ranging from Soldiers, to Sailors, to Maynard & Captain Hook to an entire Native Force and even including some island terrain, Kyle covered a wide range of work and got some great pictures. Congratulations to Kyle Arpke for getting so much great work done over the course of this event!

The prize for this category is a Blood & Plunder storage box with dividing insert, from Things from the Basement.

Best New Painter

We had several new painters participate in this event and they did some very impressive work!

One of the standout entries by a relatively new painter was this Bermuda Slop & crew by Robert McFarland. Robert is new to Blood & Plunder and new to painting but he seems to be off to a great start! Welcome to the game and nice job on your ship and crew! Robert noted that the sails on this Bermuda Sloop are from Rick Casler.

The prize for this category is a set of 2 Winsor & Newton paint brushes. The best of the best!

Best Kitbashed Miniature

This was a hard category to judge (partly because we didn’t really define “kitbash”). We added “anything unusually built or employing major modifications” into this category. While nearly impossible to judge while weighing the alterations, creativity, and paint jobs, Lee Upton’s Midshipman model (made from the legendary La Buse model) ended up winning the prize. It’s a simple change, but it massively changes how the model can be used.

The prize for this category is a copy of the much-coveted Box of Plunder Sprue that contains so many of those fun bits that can open up options for kitbashing.

Jason didn’t technically enter his Cuban Merchant (Mike Tunez) model in the contest, but I added it to this gallery of some of the great mini modifications we saw in the contest.

Randomly Drawn Prizes

We want to thank everyone for participating in this event and draw some more winners for some little prizes.

Three Random Ship Entries

Each of these ship entries will receive a nice double sided laser cut maneuver template to help that shiny new ship precisely scoot around the sea.

Our winners here are Holly Hayden with her pirate Bermuda Sloop, Adam Johnston with his Birchbark Canoe, and Ron Allshouse with an excellently rigged Brigantine.

Three Random Commanders

It was great to see so many commander entries. If you want to spend extra care and time on a model in your force, the Commander is the best choice! And with all those new Pirates of Legend models, painters had plenty of options to work with for this contest.

Three random entries have been selected to receive a set of some of the custom (but legal) commander cards we printed as part of the 2022 Summer of Plunder. These commander cards utilize the “build your own commander” model found in Raise the Black, each representing a Seasoned Generic Commander from various nations, and bearing a name representing one of last year’s commanders. Collector’s items!

Our three winners here are Jacob Zuvic for his Spanish Commander, George Helmer for his Piet Heyn, and Jerry Kegley for his Black Caesar. Nice work guys!

Three Random Oak & Iron Entries

With prize support coming in the form of 3d printed (and hand painted) wake tokens from Jason at Timber & Sail, our three random winners in the Oak & Iron category are Jack Baker for his Queen Anne’s Revenge, Pawel Pinker for his Fluyt, Leon Keller for his 5th Rate Frigate.

Two Random Terrain Entries

The Tales of the Sail podcast has donated some custom terrain items as prizes for 2 random terrain entries. And… the winners are: Oliver Kahler with his Island Terrain and Gerardo Gonzalez with his (real wood) fence breastworks.

Three Random Winners from All Entries

And finally, just for fun, we have 3 random entries from all categories that will receive a historical restrike coin that can be used in the game as a Fortune Token.

And from our 400+ entries we have Holly Hayden for her Marins, Samuel Parent-Davidson for his awesome Stede Bonnet, and Matt Liddic for his Spanish Commander.

Conclusion

Thank you everyone for entering! We wish we could send fun loot to everyone who participated. But there’s more plunder to be gained in our Summer of Plunder coming up in just one week! You can check out news and details about that here.

Thank you to all our contest sponsors who have donated all these prizes:

• The Plunder Den
• Tales of the Sail
• Timber & Sail
• The Doubloon Lagoon
• Things from the Basement
• The Dead Man’s Chest
• Seamons’ Quality Sails

Please continue to vote for your favorite entries in our People’s Choice Categories. Every day this week, one entry will be removed as the race narrows! You can vote once per day in each category.

We hope you enjoyed this year’s Great Pirate Paint Off. It was amazing to see all these miniatures getting painted! Thank you all for participating! We didn’t know really what to expect as far as participation levels but we were very happy to double our anticipated numbers.

But there’s no reason to stop now. The Summer of Plunder is starting up in the first week of June, so finish up those forces you want to play!

Watch for one final post at the end of this week when the People’s Choice prizes are awarded.