I created this pirate ship using Blender 2.63.
First I found some reference for ships/pirate ships. Then I made front view, side view, rear view, and top view drawings in Gimp that I then brought into Blender and used to help me model the ship. I needed to keep it low poly, so I had to be conservative while I was modeling. I used a mirror modifier to keep the model symmetrical. I cut seams in the model, unwrapped it, exported the UVs to Gimp and then painted the textures using both Inkscape and Gimp. I used Inkscape mainly for painting the woodgrain because being a vector graphic editor, I could then easily modify the lines.
