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.