DIY Chess Pieces: Paint Your Own Set in a Weekend (2026)

Making your own chess pieces comes down to one of two jobs: you either paint and finish a blank wooden set of 32, or you shape pieces yourself from square stock. The paint-your-own route is a weekend. The carving route is a winter.

I've sat at club tables with homemade sets more than once, and the difference between a set that gets used and one that lives on a shelf is almost never the artwork. It's the finish. A king gets picked up 30 or 40 times in a single club game, and paint that rubs off by move 12 is worse than no paint at all.

Count the pieces and pick a king height first

Standard chess needs 32 pieces, 16 per side, and I'd plan for two extra queens no matter what. Promotions happen, and a spare queen rattling around in the box saves you from digging through a drawer mid-game. If a blank set is sold as 32 pieces only, that's one queen per side, which is fine for casual games and mildly annoying for anything organized. The full breakdown sits in our how many pieces in chess piece if you want the list.

King height sets the scale for everything else. US Chess guidance puts competition kings between roughly 3.375 and 4.5 inches, with squares of 2 to 2.5 inches and a king base about 75 to 80 percent of the square. The AEVVV blank set runs a 3.4 inch king, which is right at the bottom of that range and, honestley, the size I'd pick for a first project. Anything under about 2.5 inches stops being a set you play on and becomes a set you display.

What each of the six shapes asks of you

Blanks arrive shaped, not finished. You've got four stages per piece (sand, base coat, color, clear coat), and you're doing them 32 times, so be honest with yourself about the schedule. The difficulty isn't spread evenly across the six shapes. Here's how the AEVVV set steps down from the king, and where each shape fights you.

Painting a knight freehand is where most first sets go wrong. Sketch both knights on paper before you touch the wood, front and side, and keep the pencil lines faint if you draw straight onto the blank. Our chess pieces drawing guide has the six shapes from three angles if you need a reference to work from.

Sizing a homemade set so the board still works

Nobody warns you about this part. A beautiful set on the wrong board plays badly, because the king base needs to clear the square with room left over or you spend the whole game knocking pieces into each other. If you want the standard proportions for a Staunton style set, our chess pieces reference covers the shapes and how they relate.

The KALLORY pieces come in at 1.18 inches tall, which is travel set territory and well under tournament sizing. They ship with their own vinyl board, and the listing doesn't state the square size, so measure it when it lands before you build anything to match. If you're cutting a board yourself, the diy chess board walkthrough covers square sizing and the border most people forget.

Sanding, priming, and a finish that survives handling

Start at 220 grit, then go over the same piece with 400, and dust it off with a tack cloth before anything wet touches the wood. Two thin coats beat one thick coat every single time. Acrylic dries fast enough that you can base coat and color in the same evening if the room is warm, and you'll still be ahead of the person who slopped on one heavy layer and waited two days.

Finish with two coats of matte or satin polyurethane, sanding lightly with 400 grit between them. Gloss shows every fingerprint under club lighting, and it makes cheap wood look cheaper. Stick a 1 mm self-adhesive felt pad under each base and the pieces slide instead of scraping, which matters a lot on a roll-up vinyl board.

Before you commit to a color scheme, print a board at the square size you're building and stand three finished pieces on it. Problems that are invisible on a workbench jump out in print. Our printable chess board files scale cleanly for this.

If you need a set to learn on

Two blank sets are worth a look, and I'll say plainly that I haven't bought, painted or played on either one. What I have done is read both listings the way I read every listing, starting with the sizes and what's actually in the box.

Unfinished Wood Chess Pieces Only Set of 32 pcs

by AEVVV

• PERFECT DIMENSIONS: king - 3.4''; queen - 3; bishop - 2.4''; knight and rook - 2.2''; pawn - 2''
• DIY DESIGN: blank wooden chess pieces ideal to spray creativity and make your own unique chess set
• ECO-FRIENDLY MATERIALS: Chess pieces are hand carved out of the highest-grade wood by our masters
• UNIQUE GIFT: unpainted chess pieces are great gift for people who like game of chess and craft

Check price on Amazon

Thirty-two hand-carved blanks with a 3.4 inch king stepping down to a 2 inch pawn, described as pieces only with no board, which suits anyone who already owns a board or plans to build one.

KALLORY 50Pcs Unpainted Wooden Chess Pieces Only for Board Games

by KALLORY

Check price on Amazon

Fifty pieces at 1.18 by 0.59 inches with a vinyl board in the box, so it's a travel-size paint project with spares rather than a club set, and that small scale is the whole point.

The KALLORY kit is cheap, comes with a board, and gives a kid 50 pieces to experiment on without anyone worrying about ruined wood. Just don't expect a 1.18 inch piece to feel like a tournament set, because it won't. That's a fair trade at that size, not a flaw.

Here's the next step I'd actually take: buy one blank set, sand and paint a single king and a single pawn, then live with them for a few days of casual games before you touch the other 30. If the finish holds up on the two pieces that get handled most, batch the rest with confidence.