 Most factories copied from other porcelain, book illustrations for animals and plants, and prints for people, but a note in the Bowcocke papers to buy a partridge "dead or alive" suggests some modelling, or at least colouring, from real models was undertaken.Bow porcelain adopted the newly invented technique of transfer printing from Battersea enamels in the later 1750s, although it "was never well-established as a mode of decoration", and sometimes mixed with painting on a single piece.As with other factories, some figures were apparently simply painted, rather than enamelled (followed by a second firing).