Alexis Polux aka the Crimson Fist (due to all the punching). I loved this model the first time I saw it announced by Forgeworld and knew I wanted to paint it, little did I know it would turn out to be one of the most stressful and generally frustrating kits I have painted to date.

There were several problems with painting this kit and only some of them were self inflicted. Before I even got to the point of putting any paint on the model Forgeworld had already decided to ruin my day by covering this model in so much mould release that nothing would stick to it. I scrubbed, I sanded, I soaked it overnight, ran it through an ultrasonic cleaner and even cleaned it with alcohol and STILL the mould release kept coming. It seems I got one of the rare pulls where the mould release had mixed in with the Resin and was weeping out very lowly overtime. Just when I thought it was ready to be painted the primer would just bubble up and slide off causing me to have to go back and clean it yet again.

I should have stopped there. It was a sign of things to come.

Eventually after weeks of cleaning, priming, sanding, cleaning and re-priming the model was ready to paint. Naturally I decided to paint the kit in sub-assemblies with every single piece remaining separate until the end, this made it much easier to paint behind the shield and the power fist where there are some amazing details that you now can’t see at all; I maintain that some of my finest true metallic metals are on the back of that shield where nobody can appreciate them.

Alexis himself wasn’t that much of a problem to paint with one exception – his head. I hadn’t painted any of the Forgeworld Character Series kits before so I hadn’t fully grasped how much smaller their heads are than a regular plastic Space Marine. They are TINY. When putting them side-by-side with a plastic marine head it turned out that Alexis has an abnormally small head clocking in at about 2/3 the size of a plastic one. This was a particular problem for painting the eyes and in total I ended up stripping this head about 7 or 8 times before I was happy with it (this was also before I started painting with magnification) – losing his ear in the process (you can barely notice). I tried multiple techniques to try and paint the eyes and in the end plumped for just painting them black and walking away which is a terrible idea for a competition entry – always paint the eyes on a competition entry even if you do it badly.

I experimented with some Colour Zone theory for his face in the end, my first foray into this technique. The general gist is that on masculine faces there are 3 “zones” of colour, Blue, Red and Yellow. I should point out the inherent racism present in this theory because it only really applies to white people skin tones which are very translucent and originates far in the past with long-dead European painters. The blue zone is caused by facial hair and is visible even on a clean-shaven face as a very subtle blue or purple hue to the skin tone, the Red zone is around the cheeks and nose and is caused by the larger density of blood vessels in these areas as well as the larger amount of soft tissue and cartilage. The “Yellow” zone is basically everywhere else and is where a lot of the racism comes in because very pale white people predominantly have a yellow hue to their skin. I achieved this by first painting the skin a base colour and then using very thin glazes of blue and red to tint the blue and red zones and then mixing in some ivory into my base colour to highlight the brow. This is pretty much how I still paint white faces today and it works really well while actually being very fast to do. I still struggle to paint any skin tone that isn’t white and it’s something I really want to get better at.

The yellow armour was the same Screamer Pink base coat recipe as my Ironjawz warband for Warhammer Underworlds but instead of using a purple wash to shade it I painted in Reikland Fleshshade very carefully into the recesses. I then highlighted it with Dorn Yellow and some small scratches were done in white.

The black parts were a wierd kind of Non-metallic metal effect which I think sits a little oddly alongside the true metallic metals. I was going for a shiny hard black finish and I think I did well on the shield but the shoulder pad trim seems a bit off to me now. In this case I just started with black and used a loaded brush technique to with some Administratum Grey to paint the transitions. It didn’t really start to look “Right” until I added highlights with pure white though.

As I said Alexis himself wasn’t a huge problem, painted over about 2 months I was pretty happy with how he looked. All I had left to do was the base. This was where things fell apart.

With only a little over a week to go before the event I discovered that I had no idea how to paint the display base. I had looked at a lot of other painters attempts and come to a conclusion – The Iron Warriors banner was stealing all the attention. My first attempt at painting the banner had resulted in a yellow that was very similar to the one I used for the power armour – bright and clean. The result was that the composition was pretty much ruined. I have a fairly lore focused approach to painting – rather than consider what might be best for the composition I typically prefer to paint things how they should be rather than how might look prettiest – for example an Ork Flash Git might look better with more muted colours in their palette and just a few bright spot colours at strategic locations in order to draw the eye to their face but I prefer to paint them as loud and gaudy as the lore depicts them which makes for a terrible composition. In this case however it turned out that this attitude would save the paint job, the banner is on the floor of a battle damaged building that presumably had been under siege by the Imperial Fists for perhaps weeks before Alexis finally gets to climb these steps. Rather than depicting it as a banner that had been freshly torn down I decided that this banner had fallen long ago and been torn up by fire and explosions, fought over and generally trodden on by every marine that has passed through this area. It shouldn’t be bright and clean but faded, burnt and dusty. It took me 3 attempts (stripping the base between each) before I got to a look I liked for the banner where it wasn’t over-powering Alexis and looked integrated into the scene while still having all of the Iron Warriors iconography visible. It was for the same lore-based reasons that I decided to paint all the light fittings as being just broken glass rather than indulging in some lighting effects like most versions of this kit, after all when you look around the back of the model it’s clear that all of the cables to this particular staircase have been torn apart by explosions – there is no way to power these lights.

I painted Alexis over 2 months in a fairly relaxed fashion with only his face giving me any major headaches but his base had been painted in a single week, stripped at least 3 times and in terms of cumulative hours of painting probably ended up exceeding Alexis himself. Alexis Polux did not make if past the first cut at Golden Demon Classic 2018 but my Sepulchral Guard warband that I painted in a single weekend using mostly dry-brushing did.

Go figure.