I've had a wonderful time repainting my Firespray-31 as "Marauder," Kath Scarlet's ship.

I'd like to repaint some of my Z-95s as her Binayre pirates, as shown in the attached 1E card art.

Is there any way to facilitate painting the checkerboards? Are there good stencils of the appropriately (very small) size? Or is this something that must truly be freehanded?

For freehanding, if there's no better way, I'm basically looking at painting a red grid with the finest lines I possibly can, then filling in alternate squares in red ...

Thanks all for any advice. I'm humbled by the wonderful repainting work I've seen showcased in this forum.

Here's what I've found:

1. Paint one of the two colors as a base.
2. Draw a grid
3. Fill in every other square with color #2
4. Clean up edges with color #1

Some folks like to paint white on black, others black on white. For your zed pirates, you'll likely put the gray down first as your base, then draw the grid, then paint in the red squares.

Working that small is going to be a pain in the neck, but you know yourself best. If all you want is to capture the spirit of the checkerboard, you can work with larger squares. Either way, it requires a lot of patience.

Some people use a mechanical pencil to draw the grid, others paint it on.

ere's a decent video I found:

Step 1: draw a checkerboard