Custom icons: how to to make dopus use these?

It may depend on how IconTweaker changes the icons. There are a few methods and some only work on Explorer. (Some seem to actually target explorer.exe when all that's really needed is a registry setting, for example.)

Have a look at this FAQ for some details and the registry settings for changing the folder icons (very simple to do by hand to check that it works):

[Change the default folder icon in Opus)