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Hello all. I am never sure who will read my threads, so tend to babble on incoherently. Apologies therefore if it gets annoying

The Balrog is quite the beasty, in many ways. I was bought the original GW metal figure (with plastic wings in box, not the very first with metal wings) at the time of it's release. It was always a model I was sure I was not up to the task of completing, so it sat gathering dust. That is until I started entering Paradigm's painting contests and started seeing a huge improvement in my abilities (still not pro, but better than when I started). Therefore in October 2015 I entered it in to the October contest for Halloween. Unfortunately it was not a smooth trip and I thought I would share my experiences to date to help others on their own path. So here it is, a sort of "How to" (or more "This is how I did it, up to you if you want to do the same....") mixed with a WIP thread.

So I built this beautiful beasty in October (started October 4th according to Dakka) and this is how it looks:

The main point of note is the huge gaps between parts, I was dismayed, this was not gonna happen in 1 month!!! Some blogs report this problem and it is just a shame, without modelling skills, this would look awful.

So I set about using GS to fill the gaps:

This is sadly not as smooth as the photos suggest. In fact I only finished half of the GS and had to abandon later that month because RL became horribly busy and I had to stop all hobbying in the meantime much to my dismay. I have only been back painting since about March time, so was horrified at thought that I would have to hang up the brushes. But RL took precedence.

However, things settled quicker than I thought (a little) and as Christmas was nearly upon us I finished the GS as you see above

During the GS phase I was irritated at the prospect of wasting excess GS and I hated that the new plastic kit has the flame base, so decided to recycle my leftover GS to make a stone slab base to represent the mines as seen in the LOTR movie. I think it worked out quite well. So each time I had a GS session, an extra slab or two was added until the final piece looked like this:


Two pins were inserted through the base and in to the legs and combined the Balrog now looked like this pre-priming:


Then late December the was primed:


And then the fun started. So the flames are a bit inconsistent even on the official GW photos, because the flames are often painted with the yellow outermost, but that's not how flames work - the source is brightest. So the source is the Balrog, therefore the tips of the flames should be red. This however is a pain to paint, but this is how I tackled it:
A white basecoat was painted over the cracks between scales, sword and dorsal flames. There were two THINNED layers painted, this is after the first:

I tried adding thinned paints to my skill set previously and failed miserably - I got in a muddle with the mixing phase trying to get consistency with thinner etc. This time I bought plastic dropper pipettes for the thinner fluid and it was a revelation. You must, must, must thin paints, it will produce incredible results:

Next is the first yellow layer using GW flash gitz yellow:

After the second caught it started looking more "right". This is a comparison of the two layers:

This photo shows the progression from the yellow to a nearly finished red flame using (from left to right) 2:1:2 mix of flash gitz yellow:troll slayer orange:thinner, then 1:1 troll slayer orange:thinner, then 3:1:3 Troll Slayer Orange:evil Sunz scarlet:thinner and finally a layer of carroburg crimson wash. The three layers of orange had graduated end points and wet blended transitions between each layer. The wash layer was used quite thin first time, then thick on 2nd application to deepen the recesses. The wash was not heavily applied to the yellow, in fact it was only lightly so for transition. The areas around the scales were all painted exactly the same to build some variety and depth.


There is more to come, but that's for another post. Thanks for reading. Would be interested to hear C&C if anyone has any.

Those flames are looking pretty good so far!
I got one of the plastic Balrog kits and it's been sitting on my desk half finished because I could never get the flames to look quite right.

Know your pain. Try this out, see how it works

He's looking the business TP. Flames coming along beautifully. Looks like a bugger of a model to prep though.

Great work so far! The yellows and oranges look very vivid.

Nice work on the base stones too. Do you think it would've been easier to pin the model to a 60mm slottabase?

Very nice indeed! I'm sorry for the pain you had to go through to put that thing together, too.

Thanks Vermis and BC

Re the slottabase question. I loved making the base and it was no real problem pinning it to that one. It came with a basic disc that I added the GS to, then pinned through.

This was progress up to last night. Got a lot more to do before tonight to get it done for Januine's challenge, but pleased with how it's going

'Januine 's challenge'??? Huh?!

 Januine wrote:
'Januine 's challenge'??? Huh?!

Well, you're far enough ahead on the League that it might as well be at this point!

In all seriousness, the Balrog is coming along really nicely, good luck getting it done in time!

Oh for Feth's sake!!!! For those of you not noticing, that was written at 06:55am, at the end of my night shift and I am officially a moron! Sorry Para

I'll give a last splurge and see what I can do

And for those who are reading this and have no idea about Paradigm's (got it right that time :p) painting challenges, here is the final model. I have not done the "how to" bits for this, let me know if anyone wants to know any details of what I did.

Cheers for looking.



Happy New Year everyone and enjoy 2016

Very good, very fast!

Thanks Para. I was amazed at how a half hour a time up until last night amazingly increased progress. Last night was a 3 hour stint. So basically the painting took 10 days total from priming with a total of 6.5 hours of actual painting time.

Very chuffed.

Looks amazing! The flames really pop out from the black.
I've copied your technique and used it on my Balrog, never thought painting fire would be so easy

Capt. Rex - that's made my day! Would you mind sharing pics?

Certainly can

Funnily enough, I've been watching the Lord of the Rings movies quite a bit recently and started digging out all my old models.
Maybe I'll take the opportunity and try to finish painting Smaug sometime

Looks great and better than mine. Good job. Glad I was of help.

Building this prompted me to watch all the LoTR films too! I don't have Smaug though. Lucky lucky man.

Huh, must be the time of year, I watched all the LotR movies in the last week too! Really wish I hadn't painted most of my LotR stuff, actually, as I think I could give the character models a much better treatment nowadays! Might have to see about stripping a few...

I need to get a Balrog and a Fell Beast at some point, they are the major iconic monsters of the trilogy and both are missing from my collection.

This is wonderful. Nicely done.

Thanks Stormwall