Giclee pronounced ‘Zhee clay’ comes from the French word gicler, which means to spurt. It is an invented name by printmaker James Duganne in the 1990’s. Giclee is an art process by making fine art prints from an inkjet printer. Jack Duganne worked with Iris Proof Printers the first ink jet printers to produce fine art prints. The Iris printers are large format printers and were used for proofing and colour matching. They produced excellent colour accuracy and could print on arrange of mediums like canvas, varieties of papers, silk and linen and also had low ink costs. Once printed, the article was normal discarded and then mass printing would occur after checking the article produced by the Iris Printer was fit to do so. Fine art prints printed from these printers normally degrade and have non-longevity because the printers were made for proofing only and they also use dye inks. The company that manufactured the Iris printers tried to reinvent themselves and make printers that produced fine art prints that were durable but they failed has competition grew vast. The competition includes Colorspan, Epson, Canon, HP, Mimaki and Roland DGA.

Iris proofs as what artists called them for obvious reasons where not called giclee prints and some artists wanted to distinguish them from that. Giclee prints lasts for many years. Nash came up with another name called digigraph to distinguish them from industrial printing which was Iris printing. At present giclee now stands from prints printed by fade – resistant archival inks including solvent inks.

Ink jet printers use a CMYK process but have multiple cartridges for variations of each colour based on CcMmYK (cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow and key which is black). This increases resolution and colour gamut. The printers can use a variety of substrates and even produce fabulous prints on thick paper, card and board with beautiful fine art finishes. Epson printing technology has now increased the CcMmYK process by adding a light black and a light light black and also matte black for matte papers and fine art papers including canvas. This is to deplete bronzing and to create stunning black and white giclee prints. There have been other developments now like printing on wallpaper. Fabric manufacturers have developed wallpaper fabric that you can now print on. Now artists just don’t have to stick to a normal sized canvas they now can have an entire wall. They can print murals or photographs.

For artist giclee printing is economical, affordable and they don’t need to produce larger runs of four colour offset prints. They can print on necessity and manipulate image files using software such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel, Ulead and ArcSoft Photo studio which can improve colour, size, resolution and tone. The disadvantages of giclee printing are that it can take a long time to print a print and sometimes can be expensive depending on what you’re printing and how big. For customers buying giclee art prints it can be beneficial with price depending if it’s a limited edition, original or the print has been mass printed. They can buy a print that matches their décor and of any size and on any substrate. They can even get the company their buying it from to change the colours of a print if they wish especially if it’s a bespoke giclee printing company. The most important customer factor is it last a very long time up to 75 years and this depends on substrates used and model of the printer, epson printers are very good for this.

By: Precious Mckissick