I’ve toyed with this concept on a couple occasions and had so-so luck with it, but today with the rain I needed something to do and stuck my nose full into it. These 3 1/2″ stinger type baits are great walleye food in season and I had a pile of tails for the baits already done and stockpiled so I made up some highly reflective pearl and used it for the bodies.
Using Createx acrylics I did the chartreuse belly color then the orange throat patches. I heat set these two colors, then proceeded to do the blue pearl/transparent blue mix across the backs. The final color was a pearl plum/purple fluorescent/pearl fuscia which got thinned down well and applied at the head end and feathered down across the gill areas. After heat setting these two colors I applied the eyes and did a clear plastic cover dip to seal the eyes and the paint.
After struggling to hold the plastic bodies steady enough to paint I finally used a thin wire inserted into the bodies from the nose end. This worked real well at keeping things from moving when the air flow hit it. The resulting baits are very nice and one can pretty much know that store-bought won’t be anything like these. From the stand-point of personal use baits, these are very doable. To make for sale?…they’re a lot of work. But, they are pretty to look at.
