These are promotional 5 x 7 inch greeting cards, blank on the inside, with an illustration on the front and a recipe (using dried figs) on the back. (Click diagram to minimize)

These were specifically meant to be "nostalgic" imagery with "contemporary" color (contemporary. that is, in 1994). The center images began as autotraced (using, at the time, Streamline) wood engravings which were colored and then, well, messed with pretty extensively in Illustrator, mostly a matter of deleting many, many control points.

The patterns surrounding and in the corners of the frame were made from little Art Nouveau and Victorian ornaments, from Dover books. That part was fairly "efficient". Modifying the autotraced wood engravings definitely was not efficient, but it was certainly interesting: I am pretty sure that "drawing" them any other way would not have yielded the same idiosyncracies.

The pastel colors were maintained by using PMS (rather than 4-color process) inks, and for the sake of economy there was some overlap in the ink colors: these first two shared a common violet, others shared a common teal, and so on.