"Painting pirates in slops" Topic

OK, this is one of those tought dilemmas for me, believe it or not. Slops were typically made of old sail cloth (for working on ship) or from cotton or linen canvas (if making a pair for dressing up). But it seems like a waste of material to just paint all my pirates wearing slops in white/gray/buff. Help!

You are painting PIRATES, for cryin' out loud. They are not the 43rd Regiment of Foote in the 1743 Warrant, as modified by…
Paint them with polka dots!
If that does not suit you, buy pirate figures NOT wearing slops. Buy fops, not slops.

The thing that helped me with pirates was to realize that you're half-way to fantasy when you start gaming with them. They were robbers, they wanted to point guns at unarmed people and take their stuff. They didn't necessarily want to get into a pitched battle, they'd rather scoot. So just about any pirate scenario has diverged from history for the sake of entertainment. Especially if you bring in squid-faced Scotsmen and the undead.

A commitment to authenticity is a fine thing, but unless you have managed a tax deduction for historicity that integrity exists only for your own satisfaction. So violating it for the satisfaction of a more satisfying paint job is perfectly okay. It's only a question of which of your urges you want to satisfy.

Personally, I'd paint a few in the boring, correct way. Then whenever you play with anyone be sure to point to those and say, "in reality, they'd all look like that." This should satisfy your noble desire to get things "right," still let you enjoy foppish paint jobs, and let everyone know you're a history nerd. Win-win!

The other approach is that what we're doing is representational. There are plenty of instances where you could paint things "correctly" and people wouldn't recognize them. Sometimes you need to create what people expect, not what they would really see. Case in point: most pirate ships were very small and typically sloop rigged; that's the way recreational boats are rigged today, with triangular sail plans that run along the ships axis. But when you see a "pirate ship" it's invariably a big ol' ship-rigged thing like the Queen Anne's Revenge. Another example would be American patriots from the War of Independence – they're usually painted in the blue uniform coats they got later on, but for the first half of the war their "uniform" was a hunting shirt and "the breeches you showed up in." If you paint the pirates plain people won't know what they are seeing, so you won't have represented pirates.

Lastly, if you paint them white and buff they'll look too much like the Spanish of the same period, and you'll have both sides in the same colors, which no one likes.

Your pirates are fighting the Spanish, aren't they?

Best of luck.

Andrew

I go for the Hollywood motif.

I understand what you're saying… Part of my problem is I haven't painted fantasy in 15 or 20 years – only historical as of late. Most of the pirates are pretty generic (Peter Pig 15mm Pirates) so could do for any period, though a couple have tricorns. I actually have generic "government troops" to go with them for now (again, from the same Peter Pig range), but I have ideas for some homegrown opponents – a city militia with halberds from their ECW range, for example. Well, I'll just have to force myself to ek-SPERRY-ment as my daughter says.

Pirates typically dressed much more ostentatiously than ordinary sailors. They would take clothes (and cloth) from their victims and dress themselves up all fancy like, just because they could, and because it was fun.

Who's to say yours didn't decide to make a load of pairs of trousers out of the Governor's new curtains instead of the same old boring cotton duck?

and many would be wearing Arrrrghyl socks..!

In the case of Pirates they were probably made from any material they could lay there hands on, but especially – stained, moldy, dirty, oily from tar, yellowed, & disgustingly dirty – used sails that were so old that they were no longer usable for sails.

I have the Peter Pig 15mm Pirates! I like them. They're not painted, much.

I strongly suspect that quality of pirate finery was inversely proportional to the length of time since their last good haul.

Andrew

Arrrghyl socks – good one Sherlock. LOL.

Hahaha nice.

Gaily colored suspenders?

Remember, pirates stole things, including clothing.

"The Turk, the Arab and the Spaniard….will soon have pennies on their eyes……and any other laden fancy, we will take them by surprise!" PIRATES, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

Use drab colors for basic clothing if you like, but embellish the headgear, sashes, baldrics, etc.

"Pirates typically dressed much more ostentatiously than ordinary sailors."

Not necessarily when the were on active service. Your red velvet vest is liable to get dirty crawling up and down the rigging, and your ruff might get snagged on something. They would have fancy finery to wear ashore, though. But, again we're not playing real historical pirates, who preferred to fight those who couldn't fight back, but fictional pirates, who always support the underdog and like nothing so much as a good fight, preferably against odds.

Here's my take on 15mm gentleman adventurers (or pirates if you must use such foul language).

picture

picture