How can I tell the difference between handpainted, screenprinted or decaled pieces?
Since WW-II, the Delftware industry has exhibited a strong trend towards increasing the use of printed decorations and reducing the handpainting of pieces. Much of the currently produced modern Delftware is no longer painted by hand, but rather decorated by transfer techniques. Competition forced companies to cut costs and many have reacted by eliminating expensive and slow handpainting in favor of cheaper and faster printing techniques. The precision and detail of a company’s decorations can sometimes increase when it switches from handpainting to decaling, particularly if the original handpainting had been poor quality, but the traditional, centuries-old method of painting the decorations by hand is missing. The quality of screenprinting depends on the pixel density and the number of different screens applied since a separate screenprint is required for each color or shade of blue. Delftware decorated with a single screenprint, sometimes call raster, has little variation in color and
