That Games Workshop Balrog!

Yes, there must be thousands of well intentioned purchases of the GW Balrog figure when "The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring" came out at the cinema and simultaneously hit the Games Workshop retail outlets. Yes, someone, with the gift of the brush, was assigned in each shop to paint the Balrog and told to "do it right" because it was going to be the centrepiece of the shop window display for the next six months (see below, my beastie was assembled years ago - no mean feat in itself and primed grey but got "stuck" in limbo):

But .. as good as the casting techniques were back then, figures of this size and complexity were always  "gappy" at the joins, so my Balrog has stayed many years imprisoned in a box awaiting the Milliput treatment, but alas the thought of rolling two pieces of epoxy putty together (the brown one always annoyingly harder than the green/yellow one) makes you want to run to the kitchen and "make a cup of tea and get very distracted from rolling Milliput" (see below, the next stage - gap filling, not Milliput but Vallejo Plastic Putty to the rescue):  

Vallejo Plastic Putty was an impulse buy, yes I have many plastic kits that would benefit from it, but if truth be told, for the, majority nobody would notice on the wargames table. The enigmatic bottle winked at me but was not put to great use, until one day teh urge took me to find the Balrog. Close inspection of a large fantasy figurine like the Balrog at a RPG (inevitably playing D&D) session is embarrassing though and it why this figure was put to the back of the painting queue (see below, horrid gaps and I mean horrid gaps at last being filled, even Sauron was smiling. The Plastic Putty is squeezed out in controllable amounts that can then be applied by cocktail stick or end of a modelling knife):  

Well if any of my D&D player characters from my ongoing campaign are looking in, firstly "Hi - stop peeking! No good will come of it!". Secondly rest assured I would not be so "mean" as to do something as "mean spirited" as introducing a large, dangerous, short tempered and obviously "too high a level" monster (with quick-kill player character eating potential) into the game, just because I have painted it, What do you take me for? Yes, of course I will quite happily wait twenty odd years until you are ready to tackle it. Please pay no attention to the Bugbear and Demon Prince figures that did that, appearing out of the natural course of events, we call those regrettable incidents, so unsightly. That was plain "mean" and I have learnt my lesson (which was go out of the room before starting to laugh out loud). Carry on, there is nothing to see here, move along Gandalf. 

GW LOTR Balrog (Post 2)

From a collection of shiny parts to an assembled model (see below, it is an ill fitting beast that will require a great deal of additional filing and Milliput filling - quite atrocious in all honesty):

Fear not my dungeon adventurers it will probably not be painted in time for Friday's game. Although if I pushed hard enough the Moria Cave Troll could be finished :)

GW LOTR Moria Cave Troll - Assembly

Along with, or apart from the Balrog, the most iconic "boss" monster from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, must be the Moria Cave Troll (see below, equipped with Hobbit hunting spear - be sure to pack your best "mithril" armour): 

He certainly is a chunky piece of lead, this being long before the resin Fine Cast 'experimentation' (aka disaster) and more modern injection moulding techniques replaced all the old metal "large monsters" (see below, from another angle you can see what a good pose the figure is in): 

I found it lying next to the Balrog and decided to slip it together and was pleasantly pleased at how well the pieces fitted. I toyed with the ideal of pinning the joints but (something I may well regret later) I used a bit of cheap to hold the pieces in place an d then applied a good quality superglue. It seems to have worked really well (so far)!

Games Workshop LOTR Balrog Project

In tandem with my sons Duke of Edinburgh "model making" activity (he is doing a GW LOTR Dragon, no not Smaug, it is the smaller GW Dragon model) I have finally decided to go "Balrog" and attempt the iconic monster from the first movie (see below, the disassembled pieces "lying in state" but cleaned):

To those with "eagle eyes" a 'Moria Cave Troll with spear' is to the top right. The Balrog beastie took a good hour fiddling away with before the flash and lead channels were snipped, shaved and filed away. It had to be said there is a vicious 'lead bend' in the model affecting the tail and head, so Milliput or green stuff" will be required and copious addition filing to get it right. This is not a snap-and-fit model for sure and probably one of the reasons GW abortively experimented with resin FineCast.

Troublemakers: The Goblins of Moria

Now the painting tray stands almost empty, quite forlorn .
Gone are the tanks and aircraft.


What is left is the evil Goblin hoard that has all but broken my will to paint them, but that is what Goblins are good at, being evil and sneaky.

The background to this madness:
It all started when I joined in a HOTT (Hoards Of The Things) Campaign down at my local wargames club. Despite my not having a 15mm army I became an Orc Chieftain (of Bogland) through a generous donation/loan by the campaign referee. The game was a blast (and is still ongoing) so I came away enthused and charged to do some HOTT fantasy figures of my own. The trouble was that I had a stack of unpainted 20mm LOTR (Lord of the Rings) figures from GW (Games Workshop) and couldn't really justify in my own mind doubling up with an equivalent army of smaller 15mm goblins! Rather than base the LOTR figures individually I would HOTT them in stands, a perfect solution, or was it?

The planned HOTT Moria Goblin Army:

9 x 7Hd (Hoard) = 9 AP
1 x 3Wb (Warband General) = 2 AP
1 x 3Wb (Warband) = 2 AP
1 x Shaman (Cleric) = 3 AP
2 x Troll (Behemoth) = 8 AP

Total 24 AP (Army Points)

Variations:
1 x 4Bw (Shooters) = 2 AP
1 x Balrog (God) = 4 AP
2 x Warg Riders (Riders) = 4 AP (2 AP each)
1 x Gollum (Sneaker/Lurker) = 3 AP or 1 AP

It all started well, I batched my "plastics" up in groups of tens and started off in factory production mode. It became an organised ritual part of the day and the figures stacked up nicely. I even decided to upgrade my hoard numbers from five on a base to seven as I was using the 25mm basing sizes. Five on a base looked like a skirmish formation rather than a seething, dangerous hoard. So far so good and I raced through forty eight plastics in about three to four weeks. Here are the "good" plastic Moria Goblins [Work In Progress = basing + 15 plastics to paint for my Army List]

:)


Then I hit the GW metals and promptly got "metal fatigue". The "bad" Moria Goblins [Work In Progress = highlighting and basing]

:(


They just broke my rhythm and concentration, instead of a set of familiar poses they were all oddly unique. I fought the urge to open up my last packet of plastics as I deemed that would be a severe loss of face in front of the metal Goblins. I stood at an impasse.

By way of distraction I started to tidy up, or not in the case of the Jaguarundi and the late war German stuff took my eye. I started searching on the Internet for an appropriate painting scheme, I fell into some blogs and thought I fancy a go at that. So its time to be "up and at those Goblins" (any inspirational comments appreciated) , watch this space ;)

Note: On the upside, after reading a friends recent post on their wargame blog: http://thewargameshed.blogspot.com/2009/08/jws-reunion.html, l liked what I saw on the creative use of a chessboard for Balin's Tomb. Hence I shall leave a good dozen of the plastics individually based after all for those inevitable AD&D adventure nights with old friends from school.

:)