Gosh man those are so beautiful wish I had the skills to do something like this.
You have to be venturesome Shaun....not afraid to try something different or not worried about using different products to get different results. Everything you see in these baits is sold as a soft plastic product but in the case of the chartreuse dip it's brushed on instead of being dipped. Hand pouring a belly cavity takes about as much time as getting the same result using a twin injector but there's difference between the two methods that makes them uniquely different. The twin injector makes a near perfect line in the color split. Nand pouring the cavity makes a color that is high in the middle and shallower at the edges. If you looked at a cross-section the belly pour would look much like this ( only with the hump up. When the top color is injected the color will be lighter at the edges and get stronger as you look further up on the back. This gives the color blending a very natural appearance. If you use a clear or clear/glitter plastic in the belly section you have the option of using a product like the worm dip, like I've done in most of these, to enhance the clear belly. If you do the hand pouring of chartreuse and the orange dot as I did in another bait you'll not get the beautiful transparency like the worm dip offers.
I've mentioned this before and believe in it: The only thing that hinders a tackle crafter is his own lack of imagination. Look at a color plate of, say, Zoom's baits. Really look at how the colors in the baits play with each other. Now think of a couple colors, close your eyes and imagine them in a bait of yours and try to see how they'd look. Now create that mental image in those colors. I've worked with color my whole life and love the world of it. Others may not see color like I do, but a color wheel can be a cheap fix to that. And if I had one thing to offer regarding colors it's that black, in tiny amounts, is your best friend. Another is that adding contrasting hi lite colors to plastic is a miracle worker: blue hi lite in hot pink or blue or purple hi lite in chartreuse. The big thing in all of this is to let your hair down and not worry about screwing up or wrecking plastic. Every success will have a cost so expect it. Save the plastic that didn't turn out and remelt it adding black or a brown and re-use it in another way. Pay attention to how different methods of putting plastic in cavities will create different circumstances in the end....how the plastic works in different ways. Eventually you'll develop a real understanding of the mechanics of the plastic and components themselves and you'll be cranking out some very nice stuff.
Look back at the core baits that efishnc created a couple years ago. His idea began as a vision. That's where all of this stuff starts. Let your mind go and then create.
