Giclee

Giclee, is term invented to describe the process of fine art printing by using an ink-jet printer along with a digital copy of the original painting. The French word "gicleur" meaning "nozzle", is what stemed the word "giclee". Jack Duganne who was a printmaker working on the field is credited with the term giclee. The name was intended to distenguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs " from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. However the term has come a long way since then and is now used to mean any high quality ink-jet print.

Origins

The earliest prints to be called "Giclee" were created in the early 1990s on the Iris Graphics models 3024, 3047, 4012 or "Realist" colour drum piezo -head inkjet printers (the company was later taken over by Scitex ). Iris printers were originally developed to produce prepress proofs from digital files for jobs where color matching was critical such as product containers and magazine publication. Their output was used to check what the colors would look like before mass production began. There was much experimentation that took place to try to adapt the Iris printer to the production of color faithful, aesthetically pleasing reproductions of artwork. Early Iris prints were relatively fugitive and tended to show color degradation after only a few years. The use of newer inksets and printing substrates have extended the longevity and light fastness of Iris prints.

Current state of the art

Beside continued development of Iris prints, in the past few years, the word "giclee", as a fine art term, has come to be associated with prints using fade resistant "archival" inks and the printers that use them. These printers use the CMYK color process but may have multiple cartridges for variations of each color allowing them to reach a larger color gamut . The most common printers used are models from manufacturers such as Canon , Eastman Kodak, Epson , Hewlett-Packard , ITNH Ixia ,Mimaki , Mutoh, ColorSpan , and Roland DGA.

Applications

Artists tend to use these types of "Giclee" printing processes to make limited edition high end reproductions of their original two dimensional artwork, photographs, or computer generated art. Giclee style prints are much more expensive on a "per print" basis than the traditional four color offset lithography process originally used to make such reproductions (a large Giclee 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, "Giclee" can be an economical alternative when producing limited print editions.

Giclee style 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, Giclee style prints can technically be called " prints ", i.e. an image where the artist has a hand in actual production.