I've never used rubber bands for this sort of thing, but I have a hard time imagining they could be any worse or appear less life like than using a strip of latex, which I tried for a while back in the 70's when there was a brief period when quite a few of the tying supply houses sold latex sheets precisely for this purpose. My experience was that no matter how cleverly you tied these flies (with ostrich or peacock sticking through spaced wraps or underbodies of a brighter shade to accentuate the allegedly life like look of the latex, etc.), they looked stiff and unnatural and caught few fish.
