The third month of the Great Pirate Paint Off contest has concluded and we have winners to announce and some prizes to award! In March, the painting contest focused on Blood & Plunder unit entries. Our contest sponsor for this categories is Things from the Basement. We will be awarding deluxe Blood & Plunder accessory storage box to this winner of this category, along with some model giveaways to some runner ups and randomly selected entries!
Our winners today were voted on by 5 anonymous judges. Each judge selected 5 entries with their first choice receiving 5 points, second choice receiving 4 points, etc. Our 5 judges are prestigious persons from various parts of the Firelock Games community, all well-qualified and unbiased!
We had high participation in these category and we wish we could highlight each and every entry, but we can only look at some here. But please check out the full gallery of Unit Entries and the complete gallery of all the entries so far as well!
Let’s look at the top 5 entries, along with some Honorable Mentions.
Blood & Plunder Unit Category Sponsor
Things from the Basement is our prize sponsor for this category. They have long been producing great materials to enhance your Blood & Plunder games, ranging from building terrain to storage boxes, to movement trays, and now even trees! You can check out more details on Things from the Basement in this Sponsor Highlight post.
Thanks to Things from the Basement for their support of the Blood & Plunder community and their generosity in helping provide this prize! They also helped provide the nation-specific prizes that will be awarded at the end of the contest.
Blood & Plunder Unit Winners
We had 92 entries in the Unit category this year! That makes it awfully hard to narrow down to a few winners.
Unit Honorable Mentions
Before we get to the top 5, we have a couple of honorable mentions.
First, congratulations to Patrick Tozer for submitting the most entries in this category (repeat winner for MOST!). Patrick submitted and incredible 17 entries for this portion of the contest.
Another honorable mention goes out to Benjamin Pass for his Pirate unit.
There’s some fine work going on here, especially on this striped pants!
5th Place Blood & Plunder Unit
Coming in at 5th place we have another unit of Pirates by Brent DeVos. This is a fun collection of minis, drawn from several different sets of Blood & Plunder sculpts. Very fine work!
4th Place Blood & Plunder Unit
We had a tie for 4th place! The tie went to Ryan Peterson and Grant Bias.
Ryan Peterson’s Forlorn Hope unit, made from the plastic Sailors Unit Box is a excellent example of how you can be creative with that set!
This large unit of British Grenadiers by Grant Bias looks very sharp and I like how he was able to draw on minis from a couple different units to assemble this set.
Congrats to Grant and Ryan!
3rd Place Blood & Plunder Unit
Coming in at third place we have a large unit of Spanish Corsarios, painted by Fernando Arteaga.
Fernando’s work is always clean and beautiful! These Corsarios are some of the newer models released by Firelock Games this year and it’s good to see them in the contest! Excellent work.
2nd Place Blood & Plunder Unit
We’re down to our 2nd and 1st place winners and we had a decisive choice! Both the second and first place entries were from Julian Nault, a true master painter!
Julian’s Spanish Milicianos Indios came in at second place.
I’m impressed by the smooth skin tones, and subtly shaded white cloth. That’s hard!
1st Place Blood & Plunder Unit
Again from Julian Nault, we have a unit of Spanish Lanceros coming in as the winner of Blood & Plunder Units category this year!
From experience painting these models, I can tell you that precise work on the sandals, the woodgrain on the lances, the fine texture on the hair, and the varied skin tones are all very impressive work!
Congratulations to Julian Nault, not only for winning this category but taking 2nd and 1st place!
Blood & Plunder Unit Category Prize
Our prize for the winner of this category is a Blood & Plunder accessory box from Things from the Basement.
This custom box is designed specifically for Blood & Plunder, with divisions for ship cards, unit cards, activation deck and accessories.
You can fit all your accessories for your Plunder games in this attractive box.
Random Prizes
And finally we’re going to give away a couple more blisters of metal minis, provided by Geeks & Games, a fine gaming store in Oregon City that supports Blood & Plunder. These prizes are awarded using a random number generator, so the more entries you submitted, the better chance you have of snagging a prize.
Jason Klotz
Our first random drawing comes up for Blood & Pigment’s own Jason Klotz. In preparation for the huge Adepticon event this year, Jason painted up a lot of units for the extravagant historical scenarios that we put together this year.
Jason will receive a pack of Dutch Militie, courtesy of Geeks & Games in Oregon City.
David Cecil
David Cecil is our second randomly drawn winner. With 9 excellent Spanish and French entries, David is another worthy winner!
David will receive a pack of Spanish Milicianos and the Manuel de Rivero de Pardal Legendary Spanish Commander, courtesy of the Geeks & Games store in Oregon City.
Mark Benson
Our final randomly drawn prize goes out to Mark Benson. Again here we see Mark has mixed some of the plastic multi-part miniatures in with the metal Freebooters to good effect.
Mark will receive a pack of metal Dutch Zeelieden and a bonus pack of metal bases.
Final Thoughts
Thank you to everyone who has participated in The Great Pirate Paint Off so far this year! It’s a real treat to see all these models come to life with color. Very inspiring!
Congratulations to all the top winners of these categories, and to Julian Nault, Fernando Arteaga, and Grant Bias, in particular. Wonderful work. These prizes will ship out shortly. But the contest isn’t over! One more month!
April Categories for The Great Pirate Paint Off
April is the final month for the Great Pirate Paint Off! We’ve already finished Commander, Characters, Terrain, Oak & Iron, and Units. Finally, we have the biggest, most work-intensive projects of all: Ships and “Forces.”
The Ships category includes any Blood & Plunder Boat or Ship. The ship doesn’t have to be rigged to be entered, but you really should use this deadline to get that ship rigged up! Check out this article on sails for ships if that has been a roadblock (as it often is). We haven’t got any early entries for the ships category, so we’re hoping to see a lot come in here in April!
The final category is a “Force” which is defined as either a set of 25+ Blood & Plunder models that could be played together, or a fleet of at least 5 Oak & Iron Ships. The Plunder Force could be a Metal/Resin national starter box, or all the models in the 2 player starter set (-1 Commander), or any combination of models and a Commander that you’ve painted this year that could conceivably be played all in the same Faction.
Check out some of the early Force entries we’ve seen so far.
End of Contest Prizes
At the very end of The Great Pirate Paint Off, we have some additional prizes to hand out, beyond the prizes for these last two categories.
There will be prizes for:
- Best Entry by a “New Painter”
- Most Entries
- Best Spanish Entry
- Best English Entry
- Best French Entry
- Best Dutch Entry
- Best Native American Entry
- Best Pirate Entry
- Best Unaligned Entry
These national prizes will be selected by the respective Commanders for the upcoming 2024 Summer of Plunder event.
This does mean you might want to enter a few minis you’ve finished recently that are already past the official “judging deadline.” If you enter a sweet Native American Commander, you could still win the Best Native Entry even though the Commanders have already be awarded prizes.
Thanks for reading and thanks for participating in the contest! Make sure to check out all the Unit Entries we weren’t able to spotlight in this article in the Unit Gallery.