GUEST ARTICLE

Try This: Components
If you’re good at using components, and understand about nested components, you can proceed along several more iterations before things start to slow down. What you would do is create a component each time you select everything, and copy that component 90 degrees. Then select the two components (original plus its rotated copy) and make a new component, which is then copied. And so on and so on. Using this method I was able to get a pretty detailed dragon curve:

Try This: Make Faces
This takes a little longer, but it produces a model you can paint. Each time you copy a set of lines, trace over edges of the small squares to fill them with faces. You can usually color many squares at once by drawing a single line.