Mother nature provides a wealth of reference material & shad patterns are plenty. Over the last 2 weeks I've produced shad patterns for several lakes in other states. (I'm debating on pouring today due to a disagreement I had with some hot plastic Monday) but I can try to give it a go. Here we go...post a pic for me to use as reference material all I ask is the lake in Texas that it came from, this is important for me to know so that I'm taking the time to produce and know it's relevant. Here's an example of a recent production to inspire

have no pic yet but if you could do a beat up looking shad it might work as a lot of the larger ones look like they have been through hell.

The bigger brood shad tend to look like that..I've made them before the thing I've noticed with the bigger shads is that the horizontal line fades out to a point of non-existence.

For someone who is more computer savvy than I am...last year there was a thread showing a big shad that "pake" caught, if memory serves me it was in really rough shape. Also there was another thread on around May 15th "match the hatch" that showed a year of the young shad caught on a crank. (I've had it booked marked for duplication but didn't because I didn't know if it was caught in Texas) See I do pay attention.

Is this the picture you're talking about Jeff? Sorry I don't know how to post just the picture so here is the link. http://texasfishingforum.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/topics/9182285/1

Yep that's it..LOL I've got a memory like an elephant, thanks.

Here is a Livingston shad

^^^^This what I can use, crazy how the color of the carpet bounces off of the scales.

This is what I see in the pic above: Chromish belly..bluish ? lateral & Olive tail
Thoughts???

I'll run with the pic posted and we'll see what we see.

There's purple above the gill and a very, very faint tobacco colored line down the side. I think the bluish May be a result of the carpet reflecting off the scales

You are a wild man Jeff. Try not to "flambe'" anything today!

Uh oh. BG's looking at swimbaits!

For livingston:



Its actually more of a yellow than olive on the fin/tail, and the ones I netted up on the bulkhead this past weekend definately had some blue to it in the purple area.

And olive top of head and back. It's worth mentioning that it seems to me that shad in most clearer lakes show a fair amount of purple in the water.