About Giclee Printing

GiclÈe, commonly pronounced "zhee-clay," is a generic term for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The term, from the French verb gicler meaning "to squirt, to spray", originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since came to mean any high quality ink-jet print. The word "giclÈe" was coined by Jack Duganne to represent any digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris print" proofs from the type of fine art prints artist were producing.

The Process : Giclee prints are created typically using professional 8-Color to 12-Color ink-jet printers. Among the manufacturers of these printers are vanguards such as Epson, MacDermid Colorspan, & Hewlett-Packard. These modern technology printers are capable of producing incredibly detailed prints for both the fine art and photographic markets. Giclee prints are sometimes mistakenly referred to as Iris prints, which are 4-Color ink-jet prints from a printer pioneered in the late 1970s by Iris Graphics.

Applications : Artist tend to use these types of printers to make limited edition high end reproductions of their original two dimensional artwork, photographs, or computer generated art. GiclÈe prints are much more expensive on a ìper printî basis than the traditional four color offset lithography process original used to make such reproductions (a large giclÈe can cost over $50 per print not including scanning and color correction as opposed to $5 per print for a four color offset litho of the same image printed in a run of 1000). But since the artist does not need pay for, market, (and store) large print runs, and since the artist can print and sell each print individually to match demand, giclÈe can be an economical alternative when producing limited print editions. GiclÈe printing has the added advantage of allowing the artist to control every aspect of the image, its color, the substrate printed on, and even allows the artist to own and operate the printer itself. Because of this giclÈe prints can technically be called ìprintsî, i.e. an image where the artist has a hand in actual production.

The Quality : The quality of the giclee print rivals traditional silver-halide and gelatin printing processes and is commonly found in museums, art galleries, and photographic galleries.

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