Fluyt – Blood & Plunder Painted Ship Showcase

/ josephforster86

Last Updated on April 28, 2024

Another big project finished and off my painting desk! I just finished painting up a Blood & Plunder Fluyt and it’s time to share some pictures of this thicc beauty!

Blood & Plunder Fluyt

The Fluyt occupies an odd spot in the Blood & Plunder “meta.” It’s the largest of the 3-deck ships, but it’s unwieldy and very slow sailing upwind. It’s armed decently with space for 6 Light or Medium Guns on each side and options for Stern Chasers. It can even gain the Heavily Built Trait! But for all that, it is still very much a merchant ship at heart. It’s height is an advantage when it comes to small arms fire and warding off boarders, and it has a nice setup of Swivel Guns. All that, combined with it’s massive hull driving it’s price a little higher than the warlike Light Frigate makes it s a second tier ship for most Blood & Plunder players.

But that’s ok! It’s a cool ship! It’s unique both visually and in the game.

History of the Fluyt

The Fluyt was a distinctively Dutch design, primarily used as an efficient cargo and transport vessel. With those tidy profits in mind, Dutch ship builders maximized cargo capacity, kept the draft very shallow and designed the rigging to be easy to operate with a minimal crew. With light armament and simple design, Dutch Fluyts were cheap to build, helping The Netherlands build a dominant international trade empire in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Fluyts were used extensively by the Dutch WIC and VIC and were soon copied by other nations. They were a common merchant vessel and were occasionally seized and used as pirate ships. Pirate Commander Louis Guittar from the Raise the Black expansion for Blood & Plunder sailed a Fluyt as his flagship and there is even a special rule for his La Paix Fluyt! Mateo Perez de Garay also has some special rules for using a Fluyt in the game.

Building the Blood & Plunder Fluyt

This is the second Fluyt I’ve built and painted for my fleet so I decided to take some small liberties with it.

These are small changes but they do change the overall appearance of the ship. The two main changes I made were:

  • Lower the angle of the bowsprit (and change angle of vertical portion)
  • Add a topmast to the mizzenmast

Here you can see how that changes the character of the ship vs the “standard fluyt.”

That lowered bowsprit really makes the ship look less tubby.

“Building” the rest of this Fluyt was “standard procedure.” This was not a brand new kit so it still had metal gunport hatches, swivel guns and cannons. The new ships are coming with all those bits in resin now and they are NICE. I painted up a set of 4 Medium Cannons in the new resin and they are wonderful! One piece so no gluing together, and detail is super great! I think it really took me half the time to paint those cannons compared to the metals, and they come out looking a lot better!

The order of attack for assembly, painting and rigging on a big ship for me is:

  • Glue the wooden chainplates into the slots in the hull.
  • Clean up resin hull and cut out gunports.
  • Prime the resin hull
  • Paint entire hull to 75% finished
  • Prime and paint gunport hatches
  • Glue gunport hatches to hull and touch up paint around them
  • Protect painted hull with 2+ layers of matte spray
  • Print and cut out sail templates
  • Assemble masts, using sails as helpful guide
  • Paint masts
  • Glue masts into hull
  • Create sails (paper or foam or cloth)
  • Rig ship with standing rigging
  • Add sails
  • Finish any extra “running rigging”
  • Paint the cannons, swivel guns, and any accessories I previously forgot about

These larger ships are big projects! I can build, paint and rig something smaller like the Barco Luengo in a couple evenings, but these 3-mast ships are more serious! I probably put about 12 hours of work into this ship, with a good 4 of that being on rigging, which I did a lot more than necessary.

Inspiration for the Paint Scheme

Late in 2023 read Batavia’s Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History’s Bloodiest Mutiny by Mike Dash. As the lengthy title suggests, it’s a lurid tale! The Batavia, a brand new ship built for the Dutch East India Company wrecked off the coast of Australia on it’s 1628 maiden voyage to the East Indies. The story is filled with intrigue, deception, murder, sex, and plunder! It’s a fantastic read and I highly recommend the book!

Anyway, a replica of the original Batavia was rebuilt between 1985 and 1995 and I used that ship for the inspiration for painting this fluyt.

The Batavia is an older and much larger ship than this humble fluyt, but it felt very Dutch and I wanted this Blood & Plunder ship to be a homage to the Batavia’s story.

Painting the Blood & Plunder Fluyt

I started blocking in the main colors on the hull in January, 2024. When I purchased the ship off eBay, the entire exterior was painted red, so it took a couple coats to eliminate that redish shade.

You may have seen this fluyt hull in some of the Great Pirate Paint Off promo photography.

The only tricky technique I used on painting this ship was a little wet blending of a couple colors of brown on the hull. Gives the huge brown areas a bit of a richer feel, but really not very noticeable when it’s all finished. Wet Blending involves using several colors at once, alternating adding darker and lighter shades and blending them together while the paint is still wet.

The rest of the work was pretty standard:

  • Base colors
  • Drybrush
  • Apply washes
  • Drybrush again
  • Add additional washes for more color variation and weathering
  • Few select highlights

The stern is always a focal point on a larger ship like this. I used the Batavia replica as inspiration, but I chickened out on freehanding the central design and have yet to find a good way to something to “finish” this ship.

My ship is much humbler, but I liked the Red/Yellow/Black/White combo so I leaned into that.

As mentioned previously, I painted up a new batch of cannons for this ship and I decided to go with Bronze cannons to make this ship fancy.

I used Vallejo’s Air Color Copper color, shaded with a Green and Brown GW shade paint.

I orginally used a darker red on the “stripe” along the hull, but brightened it to more of an orange and that made it feel more “Dutch” to this American.

Sails for the Fluyt

I used a set of the beautiful Seamons’ Quality Sails for this ship! I’ve had these set aside for this project for a long time and it was a pleasure using them here! Mary Seamons, mother of Pigment team member Guy Rhueark makes these fantastic cloth sails and they just can’t be beat!

They’re a real pleasure to work with. They have great texture, they can be shaped and will keep their form, and they’re faithful to the Firelock sail templates.

Rigging the Blood & Plunder Fluyt

I went a little beyond my normal rigging on this ship. You can go deep down a rabbit hole on rigging if you aren’t careful! I’m learning a little more all the time on how ships are built and rigged and each ship I paint for Blood & Plunder, I find myself wanting to add a bit more!

If you use the Firelock Games rigging guide, it shouldn’t take more than 1-2 hours to full rig a ship like these once you have your sails ready to go. I didn’t add a ton but I added enough to turn this into a 4 hour job!

One of the things I did here was use different thread material for the Standing Rigging (ropes that hold the masts in place) and the Running Rigging (rope that control the sails). I used black elastic thread for the Standing Rigging (even using the pressure of these lines to straighten out a crooked mast!), and a light brown quilting thread for the Running Rigging.

When I was finished, the Running Rigging was too light in color, so I painted it with a brown Contrast Paint which both toned it down to a great color and stiffened it a bit into some nice shapes.

I’m still learning all the terminology for rigging so I’m not even going to try to talk any more about it because I’ll sound stupid! This is what I ended up with!

It’s still not even close to how busy a real square rigged ship would be, but there’s a little more going on.

Final Thoughts

This was a fun project and I like how it came out! Using the Batavia ship as inspiration was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to getting the Blood & Plunder Fluyt back on the table!

My Dutch crew is ready! I recently made a meta-bucking Fluyt list I still need to get to the table!

One of the great things about the Fluyt is those 4 Swivel Guns right up front. The new big Dutch Commander from Raise the Black can really work those Swivels with his Motivated Special Rule and that’s the idea behind this 200 points list.

What I really want to do is move 6″ in a Fluyt! Privateer Fluyt has a top speed of 5″ can get there with Swift. Just need to add a Sailing Master and you can move 6′!

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