#I am by no means a professional but if my amateur ramblings and tricks help anyone I'll be thrilled!

[risingscorchingsuns]

hi everyone, welcome to my blog!!!

my name is Leon, and i really, really love demon slayer! kny has been a huge comfort for me for years, and it’s been a special interest of mine since about november 2023. i want to create a space that is safe and fun to share with other people who are as passionate about kny as me!! :D my main is @lavenderbrigade but im more active here!

a bit about me!

yippeee yay i love demon slayer!! it’s my main special interest, and it means a lot to me! rengoku is my favorite character and all-time comfort character, (i have a tattoo to honor him!) but i love every character, really!! my other favorites are sanemi, genya, akaza, mitsuri and senjuro, to name a few!!

my pronouns are strictly he/him! please do not use any other pronouns for me- this includes they/them! (i have nothing against they/them pronouns, they just don’t suit me <3) i am a gay trans man, and a lot of my writing for Hikaru reflects my experiences as such! :)

additionally, i am very neurodivergent and often struggle with tone and responding quickly to dms! please be patient with me- i am trying my best! tone tags are very helpful for me <3

This is a kny blog, but my other interests + hyperfixations include resident evil, (4 specifically!) deepsea marine bio, minecraft, and stardew valley! im always happy to talk about non-kny stuff, i just have constant rengoku autism <3

rules and expectations!!

i am 20 years old! that being said, this is a sfw blog!! i won’t ever post any direct nsfw here, but I may post gore/body horror at some point, generally aligned with what would be typical of Demon Slayer. any posts that contain more than mild gore will be appropriately trigger warninged! i also might post kissing and things like that, but never anything too explicit! my nsfw blog is @hikaru-after-dark- follow there for horny posting lmao

mostly though, this is just a fun safe space for me to blorbopost about rengoku and to share mine and my friends’ ocs :)

additionally, I have read the manga, and this page will contain spoilers!! please keep that in mind!!!

DNI and boundaries!!

DNI if you:

are a proshipper

ship RenTan specifically but really any of the ships that fall into that category

hate on furries

do not support lgtbq+ or otherwise queer people

look man just don’t be a bad person ok

not exactly a DNI, you’re still welcome on my blog, but please note i will probably not follow you back if you also selfship with rengoku! i mean no ill intent- doubles make me anxious and it’s a personal boundary 😓

My Tags!

I’ve got a few tags, and frankly im kinda bad at keeping them organized, but I do my best!

#hikaru eritora - my Karu tag!! Anything Hikaru related goes here 🪲

#leon writes - my writing tag! Here you can read my fics, oneshots, and anything else I write.

#leon rambles - this is primarily KNY analysis, but it’s also the occasional miscellaneous ramble! I love talking nonsense into the void <3

#leon askbox - anything that comes from my askbox!!

#leon says words - man im just talking lmao. professional yapper over here

#leon scribbles - my art tag! Here you can view my artwork :)

#not kny - exactly as it sounds! This tag is for anything on this blog explicitly unrelated to kny. It’s rare that I use it, but I like organization lol

#kny analysis - anything related to kny meta or narrative analysis!

#writing resources archive tag - this one’s mainly for me, but you’re welcome to poke through it! I keep my writing tips and tricks in here :)

MEET MY OCS!!

I have some various side characters, but my main and favorite oc, as well as the face of this page, is Hikaru Eritora! I plan to reveal more and more of his story over time, but if you want to know a synopsis of his story, you can find it here!

My Writings!

I am an amateur writer!! So far everything I’ve written has been for Karu, but who knows! I just like stories :)

Full Length Fics/Oneshots:

Blazing Heart’s Rhapsody

Irreplaceable

Don’t Let Go

Drabble/Warmups:

Nightmares

Unconventional

Mesmerized

Requiem of the Subconscious

Completed RP Thread Archive:

Brothers in Arms (with @definitelynotgideon)

OC Refs!!

Here’s Hikaru’s ref!! I absolutely adore any headcanons, asks, or other questions I get about him, so please feel free to shoot me some!! My inbox is always open!!

Thank you for reading, and for being on my page! Set your heart ablaze!!! ❤️‍🔥

[seyaryminamoto]

Do you have any advice on how to draw clothing? I’ve been trying to get into making my own art and all my characters look like they are walking around in socks 😂. Idk how you do it so well

... that the day has come when someone has asked me how I draw ANYTHING is genuinely mindblowing to me xD I know I've upped my game in fabrics lately but this is surreal xD Am I really gonna do an art tutorial, for the first time ever in my whole life?!

Well, for you, Anon, I shall try xD

First off, you're going to want to doodle a basic body shape. I am not going to pretend I am good at doodling body shapes. Nope. But what matters there is getting the position of your character, figuring out what goes where. Once you have that, you go to stage two, and that is putting clothes on 'em!

You can start with basic clothes, the way I did. I simply draw them atop the body outline, then erase whatever bits of the body the fabric will cover up. Depending on what kind of clothes you're drawing, the fabric behaves differently. But what you need to keep in mind is that fabric usually has its own volume, weight, and is affected by a body's movements and positioning. As this body is in a general, simple standing position, the fabric doesn't need to move around MUCH... but it does need to move around a bit if we want it to feel legit.

For the sake of making it look more real, you have to account for where the folds show up more often in clothes. My typical choices for that are locations where fabrics overlap, or where there are joints. Feel free to add a few extra folds here and there, of course, especially if the clothes are meant to be baggy and with a lot of air! The clothes that aren't baggy, however, like (in this case) the gloves or the arm bandages, as they're meant to be tight on the body, won't need folds unless you're drawing something highly detailed with a very peculiar hand shape.

After that, it's base color time! Base color is very very important, as the shades and lighting will be derived from that initial hue. Gotta pick each color right!

Now... SHADING! This is something I used to do with air brush tools. Currently, as I'm working on Clip Studio Paint, I use this fabrics' brush and it has really improved my fabrics' game, so if you can find a good brush that gives your fabrics more texture, it'll help heaps :D if you can't, however, the basic air brush tool, on any art software I've used, can achieve good results on its own.

Normally, when I color, I select the fabric's color, all of it, to avoid unwanted accidents with color bleeding out all over the place. I believe some people just make different layers for everything, but I like pain (?) So, believe it or not, the most important part here is selecting the right color: I leveled up big time in art on the day I started choosing more saturated colors for shadows. I typically went for gray-ish shadow tones, back in the day... but in my humble opinion, it does not hit the same way as more saturated shadows do.

The first one there is the base color, the second one the shading color and the last one is the lighting color. As you can see, I'm not that far inside the black area of the color wheel in the shading one, but I'm choosing a much more intense shade of blue, and that results in a contrast that doesn't require a lot of darkness to feel right.

As for where to apply your shading? That's in fact what the folds are for! :D they serve as guidelines, pretty much, for how you'll shift the color across the fabric. At the shading stage you can even add extra folds you didn't place in your lineart too, if you want, but what matters most is that they will give your clothing volume and texture.

Just as it is with the shading, lighting will lean on the folds as well!

(don't fret, we ain't done yet xD gotta soften that lighting later, naturally...)

I picked a much brighter color for the lighting, and far closer to white. This can work fairly well, but you can also choose a more saturated color if you want to, in some clothes. Makes them feel extra luxurious in my experience xD One of my tricks here is that there will be parts touched by the light that will be brighter than others. Hence why you can see that, while I applied my brush all over the folds, some parts are softer than others. This as well provides texture to the piece, and a dynamic feel that offers it extra volume.

With my base color once again, I've softened the lighting by brushing the base color over it veeeery lightly, and lo and behold! Looks a lot more normal now, right? :D and the colors blend well into each other (if you can't achieve this with a simple airbrush, the blending tool, applied carefully, can result in a similar outcome).

You can use the lighting and shadows to highlight some body shapes too: see how there's shading on that thigh, but instead of flowing right back into the base color, it shifts into the lighting color directly? That helps in giving the fabrics some shape too, therefore, the lineart isn't the only bit that matters in giving fabrics the behavior you may be looking for.

And as I wasn't even sure what number we were at anymore, here we go, step number ?, finish up lighting and shading everything XD I left it with very basic lighting and shading because Tumblr won't let me add any more images to a single post *shakes fist* but usually I play with layer modes, namely Multiply, Glow Dodge, or Color Dodge, to get some extra volume and feeling in clothes. Still, the bulk of the work is what you've seen here :D

Alright, some last tricks I want to share: if you take the lighting shades and brush them veeeeeeeery softly over the edges of each element in the artwork, you can get a really nice contrast that makes the clothes more realistic, to a fault. And one last important thing to point out is... commit to your shadows and lights xD if one area of the shirt is bright and, say, there's another layer of fabric right below it, you have to try your best to follow the pattern of lighting and shading that you set up in the first clothing item you shaded and lit up (?) if that makes sense xD if it doesn't, I'll try to explain it better in another ask, if you send one :D

Anyway! I hope this has been helpful, if it's not thorough enough then I'll have to think of some other way to pack up a proper tutorial that Tumblr won't attempt to destroy x'D but good luck with your next art ventures, and may all the fabrics be on your side in the future! :D