I believe the first one is hand painted. My grandmother was a master china painter in the late-60s-to-mid-70s era, so I've seen a ton of painted china that she or her friends did. Their work was gorgeous. She gave me lessons one summer when I was 9 and, though I love the pieces we painted together, mine are most definitely not gorgeous -- haha. I'm mentally referring back to the work these ladies did because it was typical of the china painting of that particular time. I really can't speak knowledegably about the work done in earlier times, though I did have an aunt who painted forget-me-nots with the best of them in the early 1900s. Not much of her work has survived (weep)
Sorry, I digressed...
First off, I downloaded the images and enlarged them.
Looking at your first pendant, the overall texture of the paint shows at the top -- especially in the magenta rose at the top right. You wouldn't see any surface texture at all if it was a transfer -- it would be smooth. For this one, there are three other clues I see:
1. There are visibly irregular brush strokes below the main 'autumn' leaves on either side of the main rose. To me, they were clearly created by a human hand. There is just a hint of magenta color below the leaves on the left, as if you might be seeing them in the distance.
2. The background is very similar to the color and style my grandmother and her cronies painted. The great favorite at the time was called "Meissen Green" and it might be combined with a faint pink or faint yellow in floral pieces.
3. The artist's signature is printed by hand at the bottom -- in Meissen Green paint, no less! Signing one's china item can be a real problem for those of us who have horrible handwriting. Mt grandmother wrote her name in beautiful cursive. As for the handwriting-challenged, we print. In general, though, you probably wouldn't find a personal signature on a transfer, and if you did it would undoubtedly be very elegant.
As for the second pendant, I can't tell much except that at the top it looks very smooth where the light is reflecting. The painting itself doesn't look *too* perfect, which you might expect from a transfer. Even enlarging the photo isn't a lot of help for this one. I'd suggest using a 30x magnifying lens if you have one. Maybe you'll be able to see evidence of brush strokes or -- if it's a transfer -- the regularly spaced teeny little dots that make up the image. If it's real paint you either won't see dots at all or they'll be irregularly scattered.
My two cents...
And thanks for drawing my mind back to a magical time in my childhood.
A.
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