Did you know that some artist have never created art in RGB or CMYK layers still today?
Sound odd? Then you’re from the last 20+ years of creating art. Back in the day, when Photoshop first came out, all we had were channels to work with. For this reason, we learned to design and create the raster art in channels from scratch.
Little did we know at the time, this, gave us a little leg up on the whole process of separations, and resolutions, and raster files for the rest of our careers. My first full time job as an Illustrator for a screen print company worked in channels. This at the time, was on the cusp of the new aged simulated process. The high end simulated process prints coming from Mark Coudrey, Jeff Campos, Serichrome Seps, Dave Gardner at New Buffalo Shirt Factory most famous for their simulated process over sized PRO TEAM Character Mascots at the time. Every part of the art was designed and built in channels including our base whites and top whites.
Many artist who had to separate art work from other people that were traditional paintings or photo's, would do so painstakingly for hours starting with a scan of the image. Some of these image scans were done on desktop scanners and for larger items than the scan bed could handle, we would take multiple cans...and combine them in photoshop but overlapping channels and then deleting out for another channel and merge them together. If you were lucky, your customer would supply or pay for a large format drum scanner that cost a lot more money but was a much higher resolution scan and in one whole image.
For a more hand drawn or hand painted feel, some artist took to creating art traditionally via airbrush or paint brush doing so monochromatically or in “greyscale”. They would then scan that in and work from that by creating duplicates of that greyscale, and then breaking the image apart in areas where they would want to isolate a color, then from all of these combined, created out separations at the same time as creating your finished art. This is very similar (or a part of) how some of the best separations are done manually.
As the Mandalorians say in the new TV series says,
“This is the way”.
