Journal de Demoiselles
Some publishers either issued out these plates as paid piece work to be done by women, men and children at home and returned to the publisher for minimal pay while other publishers has assembly-line type production rooms where rows of people sat at long tables, each with a pot of a certain colour. One lady may be handed a plate to which she would add all of the blue colour, it would then be passed to the next person who painted the green colour and so on down the table. Working as a "colourist" was popular work for ladies. These works were the forerunners of today's fashion magazines*.
*"Magazine originally meant "storehouse" or "granary" or "cellar." It came into an early French dialect and then English from the Arabic word makhzan (plural makhāzin). Makhzan had all these meanings. In military and naval use magazine came to mean a storage place for gunpowder or weapons or a place on a warship where the powder was kept. Later it came to mean either a place where valuable things were stored or the stored things themselves. A new sense of magazine appeared in 1731 with the first issue of a monthly publication called The Gentleman's Magazine, a collection or storehouse of short stories and articles about things of interest to the general reader. This use of magazine caught on and was used for similar publications."