Giclée Art Print

Giclée (French for “to spray”) is a printing process. Millions of ink droplets are sprayed onto the paper’s surface creating  natural color transitions.

Zhee-KLAY or /dʒiːˈkleɪ/) is a neologism coined in 1991 by printmaker Jack Duganne for fine art digital prints made on inkjet 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 inkjet print. It is often used by artists, galleries, and print shops to denote high quality printing.

The word giclée was appropriated by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working at Nash Editions. He wanted a name for the new type of prints they were producing on the IRIS printer, a large-format, high-resolution industrial prepress proofing inkjet printer they had adapted for fine-art printing.  It is based on the French word gicleur, which means “nozzle” (the verb form gicler means “to squirt, spurt, or spray”).

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. 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 80 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.

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. In Artollo Studio we use natural white, matte, 100% cotton rag, which makes each Artollo Giclee Art Print a piece of art.

In case you have any questions regarding the technique, drop us a line!

Giclée Art Print

Sources: About Home  Wikipedia