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Im halfway through a knight and whilst doing the edges of the shoulder pads I got messy and had to touch up the inner bit.

I need to get the airbrush on it to get the effect im after but i dont want to ruin the edges. Can i just gloss varnish over the whole lot, spray the shoulder pads then just brush thinners onto any overspray around the edges?

Do i even make any sense?

It makes sense but all you need is masking tape. There's model-specific masking tape that won't ruin the paint too! I haven't tried with normal person masking tape (as opposed to airbrush/model masking tape).

I wonder how many times I can say masking tape in one post.

...masking tape.

yeah, masking tape would be ideal, or bluetac if you need it.

Worst case, use maskol

I would absolutely not go the thinners route, sounds destined for tears

Airbrush Masking Fluid..
Nuff said..

Thanks guys, i dont know why i didnt just think about masking it off in the first place. It just feels like a ball ache i guess even if it did only take 10 minutes to mask it off

Oh, it is a massive pain to mask it off properly, but it is considerably less of a pain than needing to redo other areas because you didn't mask it off

You can try masking it off and then respraying it. It's always hard to get a result that will look consistent with the rest of the model though. You can use a combination of masking tape, masking fluid and blutack.

If you were using enamels you could try and do what you said (airbrush and then use white spirit to clean the areas you don't want paint) but it tends to not work well with acrylics and even with enamels it's not ideal because it tends to slightly tint the area that you cleaned. I wouldn't recommend it either way though unless the area you will have to clean up is very small.

Usually when I have a slip up with my brush I straight away reach for some mild thinners to try and clean it off. Usually in the first few minutes after you've made the mistake, the fresh layer of paint is soft enough to remove it without damaging the underlying paint. You can try water first, then vodka sometimes works, or diluted isopropyl alcohol. Use a brush, dip it in your thinner, wipe most of it off on a tissue (so you don't end up soaking the model and lifting the underlying paint as well!) and then gently brush over the area where the mistake is and hopefully it'll lift off. Once it starts lifting off I usually swap to a less harsh solvent to try and lift it off.