The unique thing about Giclée Prints is that it differs from so many art styles. Developed in the 1980’s, Giclée Prints were not always known with this name, as it was during 1991 that Jack Dunganee coined the phrase Giclée. Giclée is a term that means to squirt, spray, or spurt, and describes the method in painting in this style, which is to spurt. As well as being the unique form of art today, Giclée is also very beautiful, and is no way just a derivative of other forms of art; it might even surpass older styles that came before it.
Early Giclée Printing
The first giclée prints were used as prepress proofs, not final finished digital art reproductions. These proofs were printed on Iris Graphics printers (Iris Graphics has since been acquired Scitex which is now owned by Hewlett Packard) and used to ensure color matching before final production. While these early giclée proofs were fine for the prepress proofing process, their inks degraded rapidly which made them a poor choice for long-term fine art reproduction.
Fortunately, giclée printing evolved. Improvements were made to the inks used and additional printing substrates were added, allowing for improved, archival quality longevity and a variety of finishing options. As giclée printing evolved, fine artists began to see the value of this method of fine art reproduction. Not only had the printing process improved the longevity of the prints, the colors, hues, and tones had remained true to the original. In addition, giclée prints could be printed on many different types of medium including canvas, watercolor paper, fine art paper, and photo-based paper.
Modern Giclée Printing
Today, giclée printing involves high resolution scanning of original two dimensional fine art pieces such as oil paintings, watercolor paintings, and photographs. Massive inkjet printers using 8-color or 12-color printing processes print Giclée prints. This results in high quality fine art reproductions with results on par with silver-halide and gelatine prints.
Giclée printing has become a form of “on demand” fine art reproduction because once the artwork has been scanned and digitized, digital prints can be made at any time. Just as a personal computer user can send a digital photo to an inkjet printer as needed, so too can a professional giclée printing company send the digital file to a giclée printer. Artists and photographers either have the option to mass produce prints or create signed, limited edition runs.
Giclée printing has evolved from its early roots as a prepress proofing tool to a high quality fine art reproduction method.
Author Resource:
Janet Karabin is the author of this article on Fine Art Gallery .
Find more information about Flower painting here.
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