Fictional History: The Golden Age of Piracy. In the Caribbean Sea, a Spanish galleon has just sunk a privateer pinnace—loosely inspired by the Dutch Duyfken. As the ship rapidly takes on water, the crew flees in panic. There’s no time to gather your belongings—only chaos and the roar of the sea.
Making of video
↓ Below are two AI-generated videos created using Artlist and Midjourney (as of July 2025). They were made in just two clicks and under three minutes.
In contrast, my original concept took around three months to develop — partly because I had to learn many new techniques along the way. From a concept art perspective, these AI videos add something: dynamic motion, drama, and a sense of chaos that I find helpful to sell the concept. That’s why I’m sharing them here: they contribute something a single 2D artwork often can’t convey on its own.
But at what cost? AI is built on the backs of artists, utter theft. It’s displacing jobs, undermining creative labor, and reshaping the industry faster than we, than I, can respond. And yet, refusing to adapt means falling behind. The current reality? Fewer opportunities. Fewer jobs.
AI Generated Movie (Artlist)
AI Generated Movie (Midjourney)
The Duyfken probably never really saw the caribbean sea. But there were just very good imaginery references out there, and it fit the general needs and time period for a proper pirate ship.
“Duyfken (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈdœyfkə(n)]; lit. ‘Little Dove‘), also in the form Duifje or spelled Duifken or Duijfken, was a small ship built in the Dutch Republic. She was a fast, lightly armed ship probably intended for shallow water, small valuable cargoes, bringing messages, sending provisions, or privateering.[1] The tonnage of Duyfken has been given as 25–30 lasten (49–59 tonnes or 108–130 thousand pounds).[2]: 14 ”
Images to the right: “The Duyfken Replica Project was founded by the Dutch-born Australian historian Michael John Young.[10] Young became aware of Duyfken as early as 1976 and lobbied extensively for a new replica project after the launch of the Endeavour replica in Fremantle, Australia in the mid-1990s.”
This mood painting, created for Goodgame Studios several years ago, served as my main inspiration. I was drawn to the contrast between the beautiful Caribbean sea and the elements of destruction—like the hanging ropes and tattered flags.
I started by reconstructing the ship from the ground up, using rough but sufficient reference plans. At this stage, some initial textures are already in place. Historical accuracy wasn’t the main goal—I focused on solidifying my skills in Blender and general modeling.
Blender Ocean modifier. Additionally some water alphas: worked out great.
My previous concepts often lacked characters—so this time, I wanted to change that. I went a bit wild with Mixamo back in the day, experimenting and pushing things further than usual.
I experimented with advanced water shaders during development, but from the final camera angle, most of it ended up barely visible. In the end, I chose a simpler solution—both for clarity and performance.
AO pass. Love it. The ropes were done with Blender’s cloth and wind simulation.
A typical pirate ship during the Golden Age of Sail—around 30 meters long with two masts, such as a brigantine or pinnace—would often carry a crew of 60 to 100 men. This was far more than a naval or merchant vessel of the same size, which might only require 20 to 40 sailors to operate efficiently.
Pirates deliberately over-crewed their ships. The extra manpower was essential for boarding enemy vessels, sailing captured prizes, and maintaining constant readiness for battle. With no automation and physically demanding sailing conditions, every task—from handling sails to loading cannons—required many hands. Life on board was cramped and chaotic.
This intense, overpopulated environment is something I wanted to reflect in this image, so I put 60 persons in there, including runaways from naval or merchant service, deserteurs, indegous people, freed or escaped slaves, kids, bandits, outlaws.
Artistically its a bit too crowded. So I decided to rather create people-islands of interested to clean up the composition.
Using Blender Cycles, I rendered the mist pass to visualize depth and atmosphere. I then imported the screenshots into Photoshop and applied a posterize effect to create clean, graphic compositions. However, for this process, the focus was more on experimenting with camera placement and composition than value accuracy.
Final 3D stage before rendering and moving on to overpainting, texture bashing, and applying post-processing effects in Photoshop.
These are some close-up detail callouts.
