“Contemptor” Kevin here! I went to the Las Vegas Open 2025 and took Marco Frisoni’s Renasssiance Underpainting Masterclass. How was Marco’s class and the 2025 LVO overall? Read on to find out!
In May of 2024, I attended the Dallas Open for the Spearhead event and to take a pair of master classes – one from Will Hahn and one from Erik Swinson. At the same time I took the class, Mike “Pvt_Snafu” Bettle-Shaffer was taking a class with Marco Frisoni in a British pub. When Snafu posted a picture of his finished model, I was impressed by the sheer quality of *all* the models from the class. I knew that I really wanted to take Marco’s class when I had the opportunity.
That opportunity came when the Las Vegas Open revealed it’s 2025 Hobby Class options. One of the master classes was Marco’s! I hit that buy button, and huddled with Alice “RagnarokAngel” Lirette to begin coordinating trip logistics. Alice was a fantastic roommate in 2024 and was keen to roll together again in 2025.
The two of us got to Vegas from the East Coast Thursday morning. I got in shortly after 9 and Alice an hour or two later. This gave me time to obtain a quick snack, which I did at the Rio’s Smashburger. While waiting for my beer and Tater Tots, I noticed that Smashburger had boxes of cheap off-brand crayons, and coloring sheets to color in. Warhammer 40K coloring sheets.
LVO 2025 – KEV AND ALICE’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE
Guest starring Kazimer.
After that, Alice and went to the Aria to go to a pizza and beer joint that we both like. However, the place was apparently closed until 4:00 pm. However, we live in an Age of Wonder and Alice was able to find another pizza and alcohol joint that had 1) good pizza 2) the beer I was keen to get and 3) a giant frozen margarita that Alice could take with her to go
We headed back to the hotel, where Alice exercised the better part of judgment and took a nap while I got in line to get my con badge, swag bag, and to hit the dealer’s room. The LVO swag bag contained the usual con swag – T-Shirt, pint glass, sample paints/brushes, event dice, challenge coin, some promotional minis, and a full box of Skaventide.
No, I did not need another box of Skaventide. But GW apparently disagreed. Truth be told, I was hoping for a box of Emberguard to build, paint, and then convince Alice to play. Instead though I get even more of a Stormcast army I don’t really need.
After finishing my pass through the convention hall, where GW was persisting in not offering the Grand Narrative tarot cards as a purchase bonus, I dropped the Skaventide box and swag bag off, and then went back downstairs with Alice for the GW preview event. This preview event was offering Tarot cards…but the Tarot cards from the 2023 Grand Narrative, not the new John Blanche card set. A kind soul was willing to trade me his The Knight card for a duplicate Astartes card I had, allowing me to complete my set from the previous year. Success!
By the time the preview event began, I was extremely tired to the point I began to nod off during the event. That’s the first time that’s happened at a 40K preview event, especially one as exciting as the LVO 2025 preview. My thoughts on the preview show are discussed in that recent article. After reading about the “reveals” in the early morning, Alice confirmed that no, those models were NOT revealed during the preview. Alice and I both turn in early, because hey, we had woken up very very early and had an enormous Friday planned. Also, it is a long (fifteen minutes!) walk from our room, through the Casino, into the convention area, and into the rooms where we would be.
After the usual morning routine of working out for an hour and then showering, the two of us went our separate ways. I went to the Masterclass, and Alice competed in the AOS GT.
I wound up leaving the class a smidge before 5:00 pm to rest up and take another shower, because it turns out that the Rio’s hot water heater struggles to keep up with over a thousand gamer nerds who all need to take their morning showers. After that, we hit up Area15 and Omega Mart. After we thoroughly explored and gamed at Area15, we went back to the hotel to meet up with another friend, Kazimer. Kazimer is from the cold lands of Canada, and this was his first time at one of the big three. I daresay he enjoyed it.
Saturday morning proved to be more-or-less a repeat of Friday morning, except that the two of us weren’t up at 3:00 am because of the time zone differential. Alice was fairly pooped by this point, and so begged off dinner with me and Kaz. So after I was done with my class, Kaz and I traveled to the Aria to go to Moneyline Pizza and we watched the Washington Commanders, improbably, beat the Detroit Lions. Afterwards, I retreated to the hotel room for a virtual hobby session with some friends where I built an Empire Steam Tank.
Alice left Sunday morning, and by the time the class ended on Sunday I was utterly exhausted. The LVO was also beginning its teardown phase, so there was not a whole lot to do.
I know, I know, there was not a lot of discussion around con activities and adventures *during* the convention. That’s because I was busy in the Renaissance Underpainting Master Class, which ate up a full 24 hours of the LVO.
LVO 2025 – RENASSIANCE UNDERPAINTING MASTERCLASS
The technique that Marco uses and teaches is “grasille”, a Renaissance Underpainting technique. It would not be fair to Marco for me to spill all his class secrets, so I won’t. Especially because fellow Goonhammer Author, Star Trek fan, and ibuprofen procurer Thundercloud has an extensive article about it already. You can read it here. I encourage you to do so.
Unlike the more traditional swag bag offered by the LVO under the High Roller package, the “swag bag” offered by the MasterClass was more efficient and less a collection of promo miniatures and leftover Skaventide boxes. We received a wet pallette, a personalized set of Artis Opus brushes, a Game Envy waterpot, an LVO Pint Glass, an LVO Magnet, and a Game Envy Lucent Light. We are also supposed to get a set of Mindworks’ Heavy Body Acrylic miniature paints once that Kickstarter fulfills. This set of tools is necessary to actually take the masterclass, but not sufficient – there were things I wish I had brought (brass rod, more superglue). The wet pallet was a Redgrass Games Lite pallet: it’s a good travel pallet, but it’s a bit small. This was not entirely optimal for the class, because underpainting required EXTREMELY thin paints and I kept running out of room on the pallet. The Game Envy Light was the best part of this – the LVO lighting is adequate for a hotel convention archeology but not really great for miniature painting.
The most frustrating part of the class was that the room did not have its own trashcan. This meant that there was nowhere to dump empty soda cans, beer bottles, used wet pallet paper, or contaminated paint water. Instead, we had to use the hotel’s general trash cans a fair bit outside. This meant I had to abandon the Game Envy water pot because I had nowhere to dump the water – I’m not dumping it in a bathroom sink and I’m not dumping it into a random trash can. I think next year the LVO may want to consider not having quite as many spots open in the class in order to have room for a trash can.
The Masterclass also offered complimentary breakfast and lunch. In theory, this would have been helpful because the Rio has a total of two breakfast places that were overwhelmed early in the morning. However, the breakfast was not provided until midmorning Saturday and I don’t recall at all if it was provided on Sunday. Lunch it was also good, though I tended to go wander off to get food from other restaurants in the hotel or the LVO food lines. The LVO was also somewhat deficient in providing coffee.
The model the class painted was Faolan, a Zombicide Black Plague mini made under license from CMON by Mindwork Studio. When Marco revealed this was the model we would be painting, he also told us to not think about the mini until the class. I disregarded that instruction – it’s such a cool model that I couldn’t help but think about the mini and the story I wanted to tell with it.
For me, the miniature depicts a cave dwelling monster who has existed in the darkness of a moist cave for all of it’s existence. It may have had another life once upon a time, but at this stage it does not remember anything except its ever-gnawing hunger and the darkness. Until one day, a shaft of natural sunlight shines through a hole in the cave, striking the monster in the face. The light would then reflect off the walls of the cave (and their wet, reflective surface), and then bounce back onto the monster.
Day 1 of the class was spent learning the grisaille theory and application, and making the jump from how underpainting works for a Warhammer miniature to a large-scale miniature or a bust. This meant putting in more midtones and not having quite as sharp a jump between dark and light from my sketch. Because we had a full three days to work on the mini, we were able to paint the entire miniature. So I decided to paint my story: The light is striking Faolan in the face, and it has turned its face away from the light. The light bounce would then still illuminate all the details on the face and the body and weapon, but the biggest light bounces would be off the monster’s head and cloak. The day was spent mostly smoothing the blends from a blacked primed model to having white highlights, better rendering the sketches.
Day 2 was refining our sketches into a solid underpainting and adding in details and texture to the model. For this one I probably *should* have used my new Artis Opus brushes versus an older synth brush, but oh well. This involved trying to render non-metallic metals in grisaille, from the axe, the hidden armor panels, and the monster’s various trinkets. I also took the opportunity to add texture to the skin and cloth. My brushes were not quite refined or sharp enough to give me as tight a cross-hatching on the cloth as I would have liked. The skin turned out beautifully, though.
Day 3 was color, at long last! Working from a yellow light source and blue shadow color, I set about using color to tell the story. I also decided to work entirely from the various contrast paints I had brought with me, plus a couple of others I picked up at the convention or borrowed from one of my classmates. Faolan’s skin received the most attention, which wound up being sort of a sickly purple. After blocking out the yellow, blue, and purple areas of the skin, I worked the contrast paints into glazes and began trying to blend/layer them together into a smooth gradient. Marco did notice I was struggling with getting my highlight color (yellow) blended with my local color (purple), and used the color wheel to say “you need to introduce red here!”. And that worked beautifully.
For the cloth, I probably should have had a pot of a color akin to Skeleton Horde or Aggaros Dunes (or another desaturated tan color), but instead was trying to mix the color I wanted from Snakebite Leather and other stuff on my pallet. This meant I could not get *quite* the color I wanted, and the struggle unfortunately showed up on the miniature.
For the non-metallic metals, I used Basillicanum Grey as my local color. This mostly worked over the grasille, except on the axe where I went too opaque because time was starting to get short. Some of the other trinkets that I wanted to look metallic got a coloring of Snakebite Leather. The rocks and stones of the case were given a local color of Space Wolves Grey, and the fur cloak also got Space Wolves Grey because I was getting tired and I couldn’t figure out a different color with the paints that I had. I tried to distinguish the two with the grasille and the texture painted on each, and I think it worked. When I took it to Marco for review, he did some additional work on the cloak to differentiate it from the ground; and to push the blue up.
By the time he was done, it was time to start cleaning up because the class – and the Las Vegas Open – was coming to an end.
MY RECOMMENDATIONS TO THE LAS VEGAS OPEN FOR NEXT YEAR
I very much hope that Marco is able to teach this class again at the 2026 Las Vegas Open or as a masterclass at Adepticon or NoVa., For him personally I would not change a thing! Marco’s knowledge, enthusiasm, and ability to explain precisely what he is doing when giving both instruction and feedback is a hallmark of the very best teachers. The main issue I had with this class that I think was specific to the class is that the wet pallet was too small to adequately work with the colors in the size of the glaze I wanted.
For the Las Vegas Open classes in general, I think a few changes would be welcome. First, I would probably reduce the class size by a couple of people. We were kind of packed in the room, and fewer people would mean more chances for feedback. Second, I would put a trash can or two in the room. I wanted to switch out my pallet paper more often, but the lack of a trash can held me back. Third, I would probably make sure the coffee was delivered on time. Other than that, excellent job!
The 2025 Las Vegas Open was one of the more exhausting events I’ve been to: even the Titan painting class in 2022 was nowhere near as fast paced and hard-working as this convention felt. Nevertheless, I had an excellent time and made a bunch of new friends whom I cannot wait to see at Adepticon and NoVa this year.
Would I take the class again? Yes, I would. There’s some different things I would have brought with me had I known all the particular quirks of the class, but it was a wonderful experience and a step up from the hobby classes I took at the LVO 2024 in terms of lightinng.
Until next time friends!
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