Matthew helping Jeremy home

Forgot to post this before going away last week but back home now and have time to go through my feed here as well.

I finally got to draw something not just doodles (well actually i have a few sketches from now week before last week(s), but this was more of an actual piece i feel), maybe i’ll post the others now that i have gotten to post this but it was just hard to post anything for whatever reason.. I also procrastinated posting this for days (then forgot). And spent so long on the caption but can’t help but yap so much xD

Felt the need to draw a random old story I haven’t worked on for years and have very little of available.
But for some reason this old story has not left me alone recently, I did doodle the same two (side) characters last year but for actual writing I haven’t touched it since 2014? Probably wrote most of it in 2011-2012, and mostly in my phone notes hence why very little of it is available to me now since that phone broke, but i did dig out old notebooks to read the few pages I have physically and then found some Word document too.

But this scene in particular was something I wanted to draw, tried to doodle before that to get more of a design of the cahracters but not much got down on the page (next to this). Not sure I like it so far, Matthew especially is supposed to look intimidating and mean but in this scene you see him be more kindhearted and caring; was hard to get the expression I wanted and ended up different from the sketch.
Jeremy who he is helping got caught up in this gang’s shenanigans unwillingly (dragged there by his friend James who wants to be cool i guess) so Matthew is the leader but wasnt there until later but then saw them beat up Jeremy, so he stepped in and helped him outta there and followed him home — I did write the paragraph on this page but it’s kinda underwhelming compared to how I remembered the scene before i found back to it (also misremembered his glasses getting wrecked, he lost his contacts instead) and I should’ve probably just omitted parts of it and jsut done the more important but started writing from the start of that paragraph, but also the writing is not that good either; reading what i have of it there’s a few places I’m like "wow thsi is unexpectedly good writing or deep lore for characters hinted at casually" (making me think younger me clever,) then the rest of it is so bad I cringe at everything from sentence structure to unneccessary details and exposition to ‘so not the moment’ scenes that ruin the mood and sometimes comes out of nowhere…. Not to mention the extremely confusing order it’s written in, jumping so much back and forth in the timeline and having scenes repeated but from different pov, I myself dont get why the order is like that, but perhaps i just rewrote some of thestuff i had on my phone into the same document without putting them in the actual order when doing so ? ¯\(ツ)/¯
Also it’s in Norwegian but yeah i jsut don’t want to post the end result with the paragraph next to them bc the writing is bad and it doesnt quite fit the same vibe as how I drew the scene from the memory of it?
But rereading I do enjoy majority of the interactions, I think what i did best was the dynamics and it’s also what makes me think back at this story fondly, think I got the friend group and their siblings right? It’s a rather big cast but they’re all connected in multiple ways


I might try and redo this so I can get the lighting I want and i’m not that happy with Matthew’s expression – was torn between having him look genuinely concerned/sad or angry but ended up that his feelings are conflicted and more than anything he’s angry at this guy Nate that takes the leader role when Matt’s not there and the fact they beat an innocent kid
But he also feels very bad about it and responsible.
So he’s not angry at Jer but the situation and mostly Nate who he has a bit complicated relation with too.


Anyway.
The actual story is a murder mystery (I just called it Krim bc i had no title yet and that is just the genre basically, i actually never read it myself, might watch nordic noir shows tho) and Matthew is kinda a suspect at least in the eyes of the main character, Jeremey’s sister – and the whole plot is basically their sister was found dead shortly after going missing and then other kids or teens start going missing too, also James after the gang incident

So Matthew is pretty shady and does have things to hide but was more a red herring and was gonna be drug stuff and he’s a gang leader so he just acts cautiously or want ppl to mind their business, plus he’s very secretative or dismissive about things due to past trauma and family situation on top of it.
But he helps Stephenie (the main character) and friends, although reluctantly and mostly bc Laura, James’ sister and best friend of Steph and her deceased twin Rachel, gets him to; Laura and Matthew end up having a thing to Stephs dismay, she kinda hates him due to his reputation and use it as a reason to suspect him, even if Jeremy confirms he helped him. She just heard rumors and went with the version that he was the one to beat up both Jeremy and James who then went missing (not sure the connection between characters is clear through my rant here, several relevant ppl left out too, it’s just all fresh in my mind now so end up wanting to tell everything)
But she grows to accept him and even like him better , and they actually have a lot more in common than she thinks (except his family/home-life is more broken) oh also Stephs older brother Damien (they are four siblings, Steph,Rachel, Damien and Jeremy) is the boyfriend of Matthew’s sister Janice , so they become reluctantly(?) aquainted through them too but it’s more through Laura

Laura just got Matt’s info knowing he was one of the last witnesses and makes him tell her all he knows and from there they get closer, she is pretty persistent to make him help her but he highkey wants no attention his way due to all the other stuff, and that makes him look sus
But she’s very quick to notice the better sides of him, with Jeremy’s testimony as well she starts trusting him more and they eventually get closer (and then there’s all the stuff abt him trying to leave the gang and not able to and other bumps in the road, trying to keep her from finding out about everything etc. Didn’t get to write everything but certain scenes I remember and other stuff I planned for at least)


I don’t really know what i planned with the setting but just decided to only use English names but not sure the setting was supposed to be outside Norway ¯\(ツ)/¯ it mentions Norwegian places sometimes so doesn’t make much sense lol


Thank you if you read all of this random story stuff



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