Wargames Illustrated spotlights Salute 53 miniature painting winners

Wargames Illustrated put Salute 53’s painting results front and center, naming Jesus by Joey Fereda among the winners and pointing readers to The Vault for the full feature. The monthly issue focused on first-place entries in the Historical Single, Historical Unit, Historical Vehicle, and Salute 52 Figure categories, which makes the results read less like a trophy list and more like a map of what judges valued.

SALUTE 53 took place Saturday 11 April 2026 at London ExCeL, and South London Warlords bills SALUTE as Europe’s largest wargaming show. The painting competition has a long judge bench behind it too, with South London Warlords listing Tommie Soule, Michael Anderson, Jon Hart, and Kevin Dallimore among previous judges, while Dallimore also appeared in a SALUTE 53 judge announcement. That kind of panel usually means the top entries are being looked at from every angle, from brush control to presentation.

The category spread tells you where the pressure sits. Historical Single rewards one miniature that can carry composition, character, and period credibility on its own. Historical Unit asks for cohesion across multiple figures so the eye reads the group as one formation instead of a pile of separate paint jobs. Historical Vehicle pushes a different set of problems, especially finish, weathering, and how well the base ties the machine into the scene. A winner like Jesus by Joey Fereda suggests the competition is still giving room to highly detailed display work that can hold attention fast.

The Salute 52 results underline the same pattern. Joe Wilson took Historical Single Figure with Confederate Infantryman, while Marc Brewer’s Scottish Highlander and Ewan Lomax’s Napoleon in Egypt were also listed among the top historical single entries. South London Warlords also named David Soper’s Horticulus Slimux Best in Show, which is the clearest sign that non-historical pieces can still punch through when the sculpt choice, basing, and finish all land together.

Read Salute 53 that way and the useful lesson is obvious. The winners were not just neat paint jobs, they were entries that solved the judge’s whole equation: strong composition, believable historical realism, clean basing, tight unit coherence, and enough storytelling to make a single glance do the work.