A guy asked about doing the shad spot on these baits so I hit the shop early today and started messing with the idea. The dots are vinyl jig paint that's been dotted on with an eye dotter. I'll probably be left off after this one shot at it.
I mixed up a batch of plain, heavy fire-opal glitter, clear for the bellies using a .015 glitter. Lots of it. Nothing else but stabilizer and uv enhancer. LOTS of glitter. This was spoon fed to the belly cavities of the mold. I opted for plain bright yellow for the tail line color in this shot. A single small dot of the colorant was all that was needed because the X2 yellow is something else strong. The top is a very thin pro blue....clear with just a couple small scraps of black to get a thin smoke then a wad of blue hi lite, uv enhancer and stabilizer. This was shot over the bellies to get the basic bait. I used a silver eye this time around since shad have silver eyes. Then I got out the pearling powder assortment.
I rolled the bottom bait up so you can see the silver underside. At the mouth end of the belly I used a small amount of a brown and feathered it back into the silver just for some schnazz. With the top plastic having the blue hi lite in it I used blue pigment to make a narrow blue line from the nose to where the tail begins to take shape. A lavender pigment was run next to the blue on each side and then they were feathered into one another. The blue is pretty strong but if you look carefully you can see the lavender in the baits. At another angle the lavender sticks out like a sore thump where it gets pulled down along the sides but in this picture the light isn't just right to show it. After the powder application the shad dots went on then they got the clear dip.
I will almost always make a tail a contrast color of some sort since I feel strongly that the panfish clan really focus on anything that looks out of place and use that focus to hit. The yellow used in this bait has done a great job of slipping thru most of the narrows areas and in the thin smoke really stands out.
