Giclee's By Artist Toni Anita Gray of Chicago
What is a Giclee Print?How are Giclee art prints made?From Denise Macgregor
In giclee printing, no screen or other mechanical devices are used and therefore there is no visible dot screen pattern. The image has all the tonalities and hues of the original painting. Giclee (pronounced Gee’clay) is a French term meaning to spray or squirt, which is how an inkjet printer works. However, it is not the same as a standard desktop inkjet printer, and is much larger. Giclee prints are a little over a metre wide and are often affectionately referred to as a “knitting machine” as they look very similar.
Do Giclee printers use ordinary printers inks?
No. They use special light-fast inks, which, if kept out of the sun, will remain true for up to 25 years. The way the image is scanned is different also. The original is scanned directly on a drum scanner, in my printer’s case, it can scan flexible images up to 500 x 700 mm. If the image is larger, or cannot be taken off the stretcher frames, then a large format transparency must be taken of the piece, and this is then scanned. I have done one this way, and find that it works quite well, but you must factor in the cost of the professional photograph, and the additional time it takes.
What kind of printing paper is used for Giclee prints?
Giclee prints can be produced on any paper as you wish, and printers generally have several specific ones to choose from. I chose to print on to canvas. My original paintings are on canvas, and I wanted the Giclee prints to be as close to the originals as possible, not only in colour, but also in texture. And canvas prints are much more durable than paper as they do not crease when rolled for mailing.
How many Giclee prints did you have to make?
One of the advantages of Giclee printing is that once the scan is made, you can order as many or as few as you wish. My printer has a minimum order of one metre (they usually do charge by the metre as canvas is expensive, and generally comes on a roll a metre wide). I could easily have gone larger, but I sized my giclee prints 11 x 11” (28 x 28 cm). The main reason for this is that this particular size would fit standard Ikea frames which are the best I could find for the money and are very popular here. And as there was spare canvas left over, we printed small ones too…5 x 5” (12.5 x 12.5 cm) to use up the extra canvas. My original intention was to use these small Giclee prints as samples, perhaps to someone who was considering purchasing an original, but surprisingly they have become very popular, so I have included them in the limited edition count. Again, they fit in standard frames.
GicléePeter Paul Rubens The Hippopotamus Hunt printed on paper and canvas stock with the seven Epson pigmented ink printer cartridges used to produce it (printer and prints commonly called Giclée).Giclée ( /ʒiːˈkleɪ/ zhee-klay or/dʒiːˈkleɪ/), is a neologism coined in 1991 by printmaker Jack Duganne for fine art digital prints made on ink-jet printers. The name originally applied to fine art prints created on IRIS printers in a process invented in the late 1980s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used by artists, galleries, and print shops to denote such prints.
OriginsThe word "giclée" was created by Jack Duganne, a print maker working atNash Editions. He wanted a name for the new type of prints they were producing on the IRIS printer, a large format high resolution industrialprepress proofing ink-jet printer they had adapted for fine art printing. He was specifically looking for a word that would not have the negative connotations of "ink-jet" or "computer generated". To make the word descriptive of ink-jet technologies he based it on the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray".
Current usageBeside its association with IRIS prints, in the past few years, the word “giclée,” as a fine art term, has come to be associated with prints using fade-resistant, archival inks (pigment based, as well as newer solvent based inks), and archival substrates primarily produced on Epson and some other types of large format printers. These printers use the CMYK color process but may have multiple cartridges for variations of each color based on theCcMmYK color model (e.g. light magenta and light cyan inks in addition to regular magenta and cyan); this increases the apparent resolution and colorgamut and allows smoother gradient transitions. A wide variety of substrates are available including various textures and finishes such as matte photo paper, watercolor paper, cotton canvas, or artist textured vinyl.
ApplicationsArtists generally use inkjet printing to make reproductions of their original two-dimensional artwork, photographs or computer-generated art. Professionally-produced inkjet prints are much more expensive on a per-printbasis than the four-color offset lithography process traditionally used for such reproductions. (A large-format inkjet print can cost more than $50, not including scanning and color correction, versus $5 for a four-color offset litho print of the same image in a run of 1000.) Four-color offset lithographic presses have the disadvantage of the full job having to be set up and produced all at once in a mass edition. With inkjet printing the artist does not have to pay for the expensive printing plate setup or the marketing and storage needed for large four-color offset print runs. This allows the artist to follow a just-in-time business model in which inkjet printing can be an economical option, since he or she can print and sell each print individually in accordance with demand. Inkjet printing has the added advantage of allowing artists to take total control of the production of their images, including the final color correction and the substrates being used, and it is even feasible for individual artists to own and operate their own printers.