I bought an incredibly beat-up dresser at a tag sale because it was a great, roomy size & proportion.

It had a crummy paint job to begin with, and my plan is to paint it. I'm in the process of sanding it smooth (some wood filler blotches, and paint blotches).

The biggest issue I'm wondering about is this: At the edges of most of the drawers, the original veneer has peeled / chipped away in ragged shapes.

The previous owners simply painted over it, and I was thinking of doing that too.

However, we want to decoupage a poster of Master Chief (from Halo 3--can you tell whose dresser this will be? my preteen son's) onto that center section where most of the chips are. And I thought it might be best to have as smooth a surface underneath him as I can (esp. near the edges of the drawers).

These peeled-away veneer spots are wide (some wider than others) and shallow.

How do you successfully fill something like that?

Wood putty? Spackle?

This dresser is in bad enough shape (the entire corner of one drawer is chewed away) that NOBODY is ever going to do anything but paint it, so beauty isn't important--just smoothness and lasting adhesion.

Any advice for filling them would be good. We can try to sand them flat, but that's not really going to give me a level surface; just less sharply defined dips.