Eh...I don't care? But, with Sonic, Blue looks better imo. It really all depends upon the aesthetic of the character. In Ren & Stimpy, Ren's eyelids were orangey-tan. But, it worked. It gave off a certain vibe. It is completely dependent upon character design and with Sonic, the peachy-beige eyelids look a little weird to me.
Supposedly DIC used to hire a lot of external concept artists for their adaptations, hiring the ones who matched the source material's art direction the closest. So if Captain N's final Mega Man design was deemed the best one, I don't think I even want to know how other concept artists drew him. Fun fact, Robotnik's SatAM design actually was quite faithful to his game design for what was seemingly a substantial amount of development time. The SatAM bible even describes him wearing round sunglasses. If I had to guess, his final design was likely due to Sega demanding that he should look closer to Milton Knight's Robotnik from AoStH, as that's what happened with the Fleetway comic too.
I guess that might explain all the bizarre early SatAM designs, like human Sally or green demon Robotnik. They had multiple artists offer their takes on the characters, and picked the ones that were the least awful closest to the game designs. Very possible. That said, someone posited an interesting theory on how it might have been the other way around.
This response inspired me to add the option: "Eyelid color does not matter, but the pupils should NEVER become white eyelids"
I love the pupils being eyes, I think Sonic characters look best when they're just unashamedly cartoonish. Never understood the desire to try and make them look realistic.
I'm trying to imagine pupil eyelids in 3D and you'd hardly be able to tell the characters blink at all from any kind of distance. I think having these giant-eyed characters who never actually close their eyes would just look unsettling. It doesn't really have to do with realism.
This. I've always hated the way Sonic's eyes looked in SatAM because of that. They went too far with the "eyelids are invisible" thing, making it look more as though he had no eyelids. It was especially bad when it looked like he grabbed his eyeballs. Sonic was never meant to be drawn like that IMO. I know there is old Ohshima art that has the "pupils are the eyes" thing (mostly only when Sonic has one or both eyes closed), but even that one uses visible eyelids at times.
...if Sonic has eyes like this, it doesn't matter how he was "meant" to be drawn. It was probably way easier to animate.
Well, considering how people can't even get his arms the correct color, even in the 90's there was plenty of licensed stuff that got that detail wrong... For the whole rubber hose design the white really captures that era better, but, outside of classic Sonic exactly, it looks a little weird. I think Tan/Blue work better for Modern Sonic, and what is with those "eye lips"? Whoever designed that needs a talking to.
Sorry did I say 1993 was when the inconsistencies started? I mean 1991. Naoto Oshima's art as far back as Tokyo Toy Show 1990 had tan eyelids. But none of the accompanying advertisments got hat message - here Sonic's "eyelids" are always white. And in America... blue.
There's another little detail about Cream's color scheme that often gets unnoticed: the inner part of her ears has more or less always been pink (skin color), though in Sonic Advance 2, 3 and Battle, as well as in the casino of Pinball Party, it may also be white. In Advance 2's sound test the inside of the ears is light grey even. The inconsistency occurs within the same game, kinda like the eyelids in Sonic Spinball... the color limitations of the GBA might have played a role in this (that shade of pink only appears in the ears and would be an additional color to the overall color scheme), but I'm not sure, I didn't do much research on that front. Regarding Sonic's eyelids (and the same applies to any other character's eyes and other body parts), I don't really care what color they are as long as they look good. Even the blue arms don't annoy me that much honestly. The differences across several games and media are interesting, and I think that the option of turning the pupil into the eye itself can still work well for some situations, cartoons and anime often do weird things with their character's eyes in order to express emotions in a funny way and Sonic shouldn't be an exception.
I can't believe after 30+ years of this IP this is the first time I've ever seen this discussed anywhere... Not to mention despite how much this guy blinks, yet I've never noticed the inconsistency. That's wild... It's so disturbing to realize I can't even pick a color. Nothing feels right.
When I sprited Adventure Sonic in SRB2 it was a conscious effort to make his eyelids tan like SA1 DC and SA2. Knuckles was interesting in going back to tan in SA2, but someone I knew thought I made an error on my SA2 HD Shadow model by making his eyelids black since he thought they used to be tan but Shadows were always black. It was also interesting that Advance 3 made the effort to edit the sprites to go to the colored eyelids Heroes, X and SADX settled on.
It's also worth mentioning Yuji Uekawa was the art director for the entire Sonic Advance trilogy. So if I were to speculate, changing the eyelid color for Sonic and Amy Rose in Sonic Advance 3 seemed reflective of the vision he had for the future of the series. It's possible one of the reasons why Sonic's eye color used to be tan might have been due to the graphical limitations of the Sega Genesis. The Sonic Advance games had a higher color pallet to work with and the characters had thick outlines, so having the eyelids being a different color might have seemed less necessary. People played the original Sonic the Hedgehog on a blurry CRT TV, so making the eyelids blue or white might have been harder to players to recognize with the original game. The biggest art direction limitation of the original Sonic Advance games was that the original Gameboy Advance lack backlighting, so they had to make a lot of the visuals super bright, which was a different limitation than blurry image quality on a television from 1991.
Well, now that Sonic X Shadow Generations is out (at least for Digital Deluxe owners), I'll add another non-spoilery titbit of info to this thread - possibly the most recent eyelid inconsistency in the series! In Sonic Advance 2, as mentioned previously, Cream had cream-coloured eyelids which matched her main fur colour. Post-Sonic X, when various characters' eyelids switched colours to the ones used today, they instead became the same orange colour as the markings on her ears and around her eyes. However, for some reason the original Sonic Generations mistakenly reverted them to their Sonic Advance 2 colouring, even though they'd been orange for nearly a decade at that point! In the updated version from Sonic X Shadow Generations they actually bothered to fix this, finally giving her the correct coloured eyelids in this game for the first time in 13 years.
That's quite weird. You'd think the modellers would have the other Cream models for reference or even a sheet. We all know Sonic's turquoise shade is famously from a SVG sheet, so I wonder if that just wasn't a thing for Cream.
As far as I recall, Generations was her first appearence in a HD Sonic title, so her assets would need to be recreated from scratch. When they made her new model, maybe they accidentally used an early Sonic Advance 2 era character sheet for reference?
