Forces & Ships People’s Choice Voting – 2026 Great Pirate Paint Off

/ josephforster86

Last Updated on May 4, 2026

It’s time to cast your votes for the final time for the 2026 Great Pirate Paint Off! At the end of the contest here we are looking at the full collected Forces and the Blood & Plunder Ships people have been working on all year.

Please vote once in both categories on this page.

Voting will run from Monday 5/4 through the end of Friday, May 8. You are welcome to share with friends and family but only one vote per person per category.

We have a lot of high quality entries in both categories this year, so our judges helped narrow the entries to the top 8 in both cases. Please look at the albums below the voting form so you can evaluate the entry from multiple angles. These two categories are difficult to represent with one small image.

People’s Choice Voting for Forces

This category includes Blood & Plunder forces (25+ minis), Port Royal Forces (6+ minis) and Oak & Iron Forces (6+ ships)

Please choose your favorite, enter you name and email (for vote integrity), and click “submit” below.

2026 Force Voting
Name
Name
First
Last
Submit Your Vote for the Best Force
Start Over

You can peruse this gallery of all the images from these entries here if you want to be better informed!

You can see the complete gallery of all the Blood & Plunder Force entries here.

People’s Choice Voting for Ships

Please choose your favorite, enter you name and email (for vote integrity), and click “submit” below.

2026 Ship Voting
Name
Name
First
Last
Submit Your Vote for the Best Force
Start Over

You can see all the images associated with these entries in the gallery below;

You can find the complete gallery of all the Ship entries here. You got to look through all of these ships because there were so many great entries!

Winners’ Prizes

The top voted entry in each category will receive a fancy 2026 Great Pirate Paint Off medal and everlasting glory!

Method of Narrowing the Entries for People’s Choice Voting

We have to narrow down categories to less then 10 for a People’s Choice style vote to work. To accomplish this we have a panel of 4 judges vote on their top entries and then compile those votes to present a smaller selection for everyone to vote on.

Each judge got to select their ranked top 8 entries in each category. A top choice gets 8pts, second choice gets 7pts, down to 1pt for their 8th. All those points are compiled from all 4 judges and that produces top set of entries. Then we keep the highest scoring entries from the top 8 contestants and present them here for public voting.

This last step of removing multiple entries from one contestant might seem odd, but it helps in two ways: it helps one painter from dominating the people’s choice, and it focuses their entries so voters that might really like their style aren’t splitting their votes between 2 or more very similar entries.

Final Prizes

At the end of the week, the final prizes will be awarded. Both these categories will receive awards, along with all the End-of-Contest prizes.

This has been an awesome year for the contest! We had a record-breaking number of entries, and the quality is increasing every year. You guys are killing it! We have been talking about hosting a Golden Pirate contest at Adepticon next year with all the excellent painting going on in this community. Very inspiring! Or should I say “Very Inspiring”?

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