The Eyes Have It?

Demonstrating the problem

This probably may seem somewhat like pole-vaulting over a moose turd, but it was - still is in fact - an interesting speed bump. Especially given my longevity in the field you'd think this potential issue would have been addressed if not at least noticed before. But an innocuous comment by an editor (teased out back in a December post) alerted me to a different perspective on my work that had never occurred to me before, nor had it ever been pointed out.

Very humbling to discover it's possible to misinterpret a common feature, the eyes and eyelids, that I use on all of my characters. Specifically in the half-closed position ie with the lid halfway down the eye). What for all these years I thought was a really simple thing to "get" - namely that that expression meant that the character's semi-closed were not at half-mast, relaxed, sleepy, sedated etc. It's supposed to show that the eyes are in fact closed completely. If they were halfway then yes, like the posted examples illustrate, there would indeed be dots.

Before and after comparison of coloring in the white part

Not, as it turns out according to about half the folks randomly polled about the potential problem, like a zombie, because I forgot to include the little dots at the heart of the cartoon googly eye. 

Here's a suit of samples, ending here with a before/after example treatment on one set, another series of salmon showing the new matched skin-tone shading, and another new set being modeled on the mug of a moose. So the solution for now is to tone the upper half a shade darker than the base, and conversely lighten the lower. As long as the the color white is removed it'll be obvious that the character's eyes are closed completely.