You don't think that white background gets there by itself, do you?

To clear the background for a photo demands a huge effort to exclude the clutter of reality. To clear the background in a drawing is as easy as putting down your pencil. With the result that a lot of characters appear to live in a photo-shoot.

I want, healthily or unhealthily, to make my characters real. Omit their visual background and you omit their personal background - where they're from, where they work, where they like to go - and place them instead in an open, contextless no-place where anything goes. That may be fun for a holiday, but you can't make them live (that is, bring them to life) there. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Moult resembles me pretty closely here, but the photographic equipment's wholly metaphorical.