Black Mountain Gallery contemporary art by Mark Lloyd Williams & Muriel Williams

Black Mountain Gallery: art work by contemporary British artists Mark Lloyd Williams and Muriel Williams

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WHAT'S A GICLÉE PRINT ?

It's an extremely high resolution archival printing technique. Using the finest inks and fine art papers, it's seen as the absolute pinnacle of fine art reproduction methods at the moment. So good in fact, that it's considered the method of choice for Today's up-to-date bank-note forger !

To give you a rough idea of how good it is, below are a couple of highly magnified areas from a giclee print and a traditional photo-litho print for comparison. (please note the resolution of the actual paper print is drastically greater than these screenshots.)


GICLEE: even magnified many times, image is in sharp focus, you can still see a lot of detail like brush strokes and the texture of the paint.	TRADITIONAL PRINT: Up close, all you see is the dots that make up the image, resolution is much poorer

HOW DOES IT WORK ? Basically, it's giant-format digital inkjet printing at extremely high precision, using dedicated equipment and the finest museum-grade inks and papers.

Production of prints by this method is slow and laborious: the machine may take an hour or more to produce one print - a traditional press could produce thousands in that time. Giclee printing will never compare with traditional art-reproduction methods on price, but for quality it's unbeatable.

The word Giclée was invented a few years ago by the marketing guys at an American printing company as a posh trade name for their range of ultra high quality prints made on their shiny new IRIS inkjet printer (a monster of a machine originally intended for making perfect one-off proof/trial prints in the print industry). The term has now caught-on right through the printing and gallery trades. It's derived from the French word "gicler" (to squirt or spray... as in ink-jet... geddit ?) and it's pronounced "JEE-CLAY" You may hear inkjet art prints referred to variously as Giclée prints, IRIS prints, goulatette prints, pigment-ink prints and several others, but the name Giclée seems to have stuck throughout the trade.

NOTE: Giclee should not be compared or confused with "hand-made" printing techniques such as silk-screen (serigraphy), woodblock, etching or engraving. These are a totally different area of the art scene, hand-made prints are considered "originals" in their own right, as they are not copies of an original.

We have seen one or two artists and print companies describing giclee prints as "originals" that's not true: Giclee is a reproduction technique. Giclee prints are not originals. Giclee prints are very good copies of originals.

print samples: At Black Mountain Gallery, we're extremely proud of the quality of the work we do. We use the highest quality machines (Epson Pro Series) with Ultrachrome archival pigment-based ink. We use either Hahnemuhle or Breathing Colour heavyweight fine art papers.

If you'd like a free postcard-sized print sample, e-mail us with your name and address and we'll get one posted out to you straight away. Otherwise, pop in to our studio and have a look at the quality of work we do in the flesh (see the CONTACT US page)

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