The 2025 Great Pirate Paint Off painting event for Blood & Plunder and Oak & Iron is entering it’s final few weeks! We’ve had a lot of great entries this year! Thank you all for participating.
The final two big categories for the month of April are Blood & Plunder Ships and “Forces” (either a set of 25+ B&P minis or 5+ O&I ships). These are the biggest projects to finish so we’ve left them for last. In this update we will give away a couple prizes, highlight some recent entries, and outline the last couple weeks of the campaign.
Blood & Plunder Ships Category
Ships are a major hobby project! We have a good variety of entries so far in this category, ranging all the way from a canoe to a mighty galleon.
You can see the full gallery of Ship entries here.
Mid Month Prize for a Random Ship Entry – Airbrush Setup
Drawn at random from all participating painters, our winner for this prize is Kurtis Fraley with his Birchbark Canoe! Kurtis is a lucky fellow as he won a previous drawing, but that’s what random means! God’s Blessing or the Devil’s Luck!
This airbrush setup includes everything you need to get started. Using a tool like this can increase the speed at which you can finish a large project like a ship. Not sure about how much it will help on a Canoe!
Additional Ship Entries
Here are a couple entries we have so far in the Ship category. There are only 11 entries competing in this category right now, so any entry has a pretty good chance at winning the drawing for a set of Seamons’ Sails at the end of the month.
Bermuda Sloop by Brendan Born
This is a spicy one! Voodoo Sloop!
Brendan did an awesome job painting this stand-out piece. And I had the good fortune of seeing this ship (playing across from it!) on the table at Adepticon 2025!
I’m going to take the liberty of adding a few more pictures I took of this cool ship at the con:
There is a lot of hidden detail. Amazing work.
Galleon by Bradley Meloy
The Galleon is a major project. It took me a good year to actually complete this job, so congratulations to anyone who actually purchases, paints and rigs this mighty model.
What a beautiful ship! Well done Brad. This People’s Choice voting is going to be hard at the end of the month!
Light Frigate by Corben Gibbs
A very Illustrious entry! Complete with sails, flags, and fighting tops, this ship is ready for the high seas.
Clean, bright and excellent work from Corben!
Bermuda sloop & Balandra from Greg Padilla
Always a master hobbier, Greg has entered two ships, a Balandra and a Bermuda Sloop using the 18th century plastic sloop kit.
Very lovely work on both.
Battle Forces
In this category, painters can enter either a force of 25+ Blood & Plunder models or a fleet of 5+ Oak & Iron Ships. We have 9 entries so far, including 1 Oak & Iron entry.
You can see the full gallery of Force entries in this year’s contest here.
Battle Force Mid Month Prize – Game Mat from TABLEWAR
For this event we are giving away a 3×4 Caribbean Land Mat in the middle of April to a random Force entry (Oak & Iron or Blood & Plunder)
Drawn at random from all entrants so far, our winner is TJ Major with his French Force entry. Looks like we got a English commander taking over there!
Congrats to TJ! He will receive this 3×4′ Caribbean land mat from TABLEWAR.
Oak & Iron Fleet by Greg Flynn
Looks like a pirate fleet to me! Here’s a Oak & Iron fleet of 6 Oak & Iron sloops and Brigantines with the Revenge at the head.
Dutch Force by Julian Nault
Julian does amazing work. Check out his full set of Dutch models here.
And if you want to know how Julian gets these amazing results, check out this video he has recently put out!
Wrapping up the 2025 Great Pirate Paint Off
The contest will close at the end of April. We have one more set of prize drawings for these two categories. AT the end of the month we will be giving away a set of deluxe cloth sails from Seamons’ Quality sails to a random ship entry and a Feldherr case for 200 minis to an entry in the Force category.
Then we will have final people’s choice voting for these two categories, along with some special prizes for the New Painter and Most Painted categories. And finally, we will be giving away one massive 6th Rate Frigate model to a random entry from the entire contest.
We’re at 298 entries for this contest so far. Thank you everyone who has participated. Some really great worked shared this year!