Most used/most catchy paint themes?

[Muskyslayer96]

Black/gold/orange belly or Orange/black

[numbskull]

My friend Art, who probably has more experience using surface swimmers by day for bass than anyone else alive (no exaggeration), uses white 95% of the time. He will fish other colors if things are slow, but he will not use a dark backed surface swimmer. His point, which is right on, is that fishing surface swimmers well by day is a visual process. Dark backed plugs are hard to see, hence you can't work them as effectively as light colored plugs.

On the other hand, Danny Pichney said (in the Coleman article) that on bright sunny days he liked to use dark plugs. I have tried this and it works, but again fishing a black plug by day is frustrating because you can't see what it is doing.

As for night and surface swimmers, I use all sorts of colors but do best with solid purple.

All that said, white and purple are boring. Since owning and experimenting with different colors is a huge part of the fun of fishing you can't lose trying any color.

[JohnnySaxatilis]

Last year just off the top of my head: White ghost stick shad, silver and or white w/ red head magic swimmer, grey to white rickski slopehead. AHH mac pattern northbar bottle, I found a non-white one. well it has a white belly so... makes me wanna diversify kinda.....

[nightfighter]

Bone/white is proven. (don't all fish have a whitish belly?) Yellow or white pencil especially at fist light. Sometimes use a silver on the bellies. I do a number of mack patterns as that is prevalent bait.