Peeling off your tape....

Okay so I'm painting the body of the Tamiya GT1. I just didn't like the look of the clear body, even though the paint will hide most of the monocoque detail.

So my question is this: how do I paint the car so that the white nose blends smoothly with the red body? I have the white portion layed down, and now I need to mask off, to paint the rest of the car red. The rub, for me, is that I can never seem to keep from getting ridges between my different body colors. I know that I'm going to have to spray on multiple coats of red to fully cover. So do I spray on 4-5 coats, and peel the mask off with the last coat still a little tacky? Do I wait for the last coat to fully dry?

Asking for some sage advise. Up to now the kit is perfect, I'd hate to blow 5 months of work (I don't have alot of time, and I work slowly) because of a fudged paint job.

Thanks in advance,
Michael

I painted a Glidden Camaro that had multiple colors along the body. It was a fogging technique, dunno if that's what you are after.

Using lacquers helps, the paint blends itself from layer to layer, and color to color.

I always remove masking material when the paint is still tacky. I don't know what you refer to as ridges, is this the line where the masking tape edge is? Is the white to red a sharp line or a fog? If it's a sharp line, there's nothing you can do about that unless you carefully mask the red area and reapply the white up to that original edge. Most people paint one color, mask, apply the other color, remove the masking, clean up the line a bit w/a polishing stick or polishing paper and clear over the entire model and polish the clear so the line will at least come close to disappearing.

If you intend to clear coat it, you can knock down the edge with a sanding stick (to some extent; as far as you're comfortable w/out sanding through to next color), then even it all out like this:

See "MULTIPLE COLOURS AND DECALS," about 1/2 way down the page:
http://www.interlog.com/~ask/scale/tips/rub/rub.htm

Jay's pretty much got it covered with that link, however if the dividing line is covered by a decal (like the bike in my sig) then you can separately mask for each color and just polish out the ridge (which shouldn't be as large since you masked off each color).