For colouring the characters, I wanted from the start to use a photo of a real towel, or somehow recreate that texture, and I eventually found out how to import a texture into the colour panel on Toon Boom. So I imported this photo, having changed the original hue of it in Photoshop:

I found that it worked for the paint bucket in the areas that the paint bucket was willing to work, but when I tried to apply it with the brush in the areas that the paint bucket refused to do, it came out all pixilated, like the image was too big and I couldn’t make it smaller. So I gave up and did this:

BUT THEN, I decided to try and again and found that while the paint bucket sometimes couldn’t fill in empty areas, it could fill in areas that I had hand-coloured with the a plain colour. Which ended up like this:

The main issue hear is that the texture is inconsistent. If I’ve coloured an area by hand with the brush, the paint bucket applies the texture to each brush stroke separately:

However, I decided to keep this. It means the characters will have a boil in their colour/texture as well as for their lines, so shouldn’t look too strange. It also creates more of a surrealness to it – that the towel texture is jittering and changing as it moves, while the the paper background is still. Even the places where the paint bucket did fill in the whole area are still inconsistent, because of the the way it repeats the image. The weirdness of it makes sense for this piece, since it is literally two towels talking to each other.

Adding another photographic element adds to the collage effect created by the background. I like that this “real” imagery contrasts with the obviously drawn outlines and faces of the characters. But the digital drawn and the photographic are still tied together by the roughness of the charcoal pencil tool I used, like a bridge between the the two styles.