Square footage.

Anyone ever figure out the square footage for paint on a RV-8?

Just from visual inspection, the surface area of an RV is likely to be between 3.5 and 4.5 times the stated wing area with my opinion that an 8 is closer to 4. Use your judgement on which end of the scale you want to tip. Extra paint or not enough.

If you want to prove this to yourself and get a rough visual ratio, copy an RV8 3 view and make cutouts of the fuselage sideview with rudder and a separate one of the horiz stab and elev. Compare the combined fuselage side view and separate horiz tail cutout to the wing plan top view by laying the cutouts on the wing plan view. Take into account the areas that don't "fit" to see if they cancel each other out. If the cutouts completely cover the wing area, you are at 4x (or more).

By itself, this ignores the top and bottom of the fuselage. You can do the same procedure to capture that area but remember the fuselage is not rectangular in cross section so the additional surface area above what you have already captured will be much less than predicted by this 2D analysis. For others that read this, obviously the wider fuselage models would need more attention to the top and bottom fuselage areas.

If you do this excercise, I'd be interested in feedback on my estimation.

Or

Or you could cut out the views on stiff paper and weigh all the cutouts. If you are really trick, one could even shape the fuselage a little.just saying