HOME - CONTACT - ORDERING WORK - WHO ARE WE ? - EVERYTHING ELSE - MARK LLOYD WILLIAMS WORK - MURIEL WILLIAMS WORK What is a giclee print ? "giclee printing" is a print-trade / art trade slang term for extremely high resolution digital inkjet printing. It is seen as the best system currently available for reproduction of existing 2-D artwork such as paintings and drawings. Its advantages over the cheaper print processes such as offset lithography, are greater sharpness detail, more vivid colours and no tiny dots visible in the image. It also is capable of printing on high quality materials like hand-made paper or even canvas. Giclee prints are exceptionally fade-resistant. In average lighting conditions, they have a life of many decades. Its downside is that it's a relatively expensive process, so cannot compete with mass produced prints on price. Below are a couple of highly magnified areas from a giclee print and a mass-produced for comparison. (please note the resolution of the actual paper print is drastically greater than these screenshots.)
how does it work ? It's simply giant-format digital inkjet printing at extremely high precision, using specialised equipment and museum-grade inks and papers. A print head containing microscopic spray-nozzles passes over the paper again and again, spraying it with ink slowly building up the image after several thousand passes. It may take an hour or more to produce a single print in this way. The word "giclee" - pronounced "JEE-CLAY" was invented a few years ago by the marketing bods at one of the publishing companies as a rather posh-sounding trade name for their top-end fine art prints. It's derived from the French word for spray (as in ink-jet). Although several names for high quality inkjet prints did the rounds in the mid 90s when the technology first appeared (you may still hear "Iris prints" or "goulattetes" ) it was the term "giclee" which stuck. In theory, it's the same technology as a desk-top printer uses. In practice, to get superb quality over the huge area required needs a very large, well engineered machine loaded with "archival" grade ink (sometimes called "pigment" ink, in oblique reference to its longevity) The most critical step in Giclee printing is the creation of the digital image file. The fine art trade uses either high resolution large-scale scanning or a large-format (invariably Hasselblad or Sinar) camera fitted with a scan back: a CCD device capable of recording straight to a hard drive which may take hours to produce an image. For all the geeks out there, one of our images would typically be in the gigapixels range, and are created by scanning the original artwork. The images are printed at a resolution of 1440dpi using Epson Pro-series machines. Do they fade ? Professionally made ones last for decades, possibly centuries. Amateur and copy-shop ones often fade as you watch ! In the early days of digital printing, there was a big question mark over the fade resistance of the inks used: Would the prints last any length of time before fading occurred ? However. The dye, paint and pigment industries have been accurately, scientifically measuring fade resistance of everything from shirts to sheets to shed paint to sheep marking inks for decades. Using light chambers which bombard combinations of paint, pigment and substrate with adjustable quantities of visible light, Ultra violet and infra red to recreate the effect of anything from months to centuries of exposure in a few days. Light chambers are so advanced that they can mimic, on demand, everything from the light quality of Floridian sunshine to the insipid glare of a Scottish Winter's day. This is a well proven and widely used technology. Using this method, it's estimated properly made prints will have a life of at least 75 years in bright to average lighting conditions, using the Epson Ultrachrome K3 ink set on acid-free paper. Possibly as much as 200 years, before unacceptable fading occurs. BUT: there are cheap ink sets on the market - the sort of thing only intended to make temporary "point of sale" displays for shops, etc. We have seen (rarely) unscrupulous and (often) unwitting use of these to make "Art" Prints. It's a common amateur mistake - and prints made with these inks will last only a few weeks. There is also a great deal of low-quality work out there made by amateurs using home or office printers or knocked out cheaply at copy-shops or "We print your photo" services. Our advice is buy only from a professional, with a genuine trading address (not just a website) who knows what he's doing. Just to be balanced, we wish to make it clear giclee prints are not original artworks. Neither are they "original prints". We've read a few websites where some publishers are using confusing (to the point of dishonest) phrases like "each giclee print is an original in its own right" I want to clear this up: giclee printing is a REPRODUCTION technique. It COPIES things, it doesn't create originals.
I've read on the internet that everyone making giclee prints is a liar, a scheming con-man, a thief and possibly a serial killing axe-murderer. Anyone buying giclee prints is a bewildered fool: probably a "common" person whose reasoning is impaired due to dipsomania, opium addiction, social disease, chronic haemorrhoids or genetic impurity. Surely, if this is on the internet, it must be true ? Umm, well, not quite... When digital printing was considered "new" back in the '90s, it rattled quite a few people's cages: The Bulk Volume printers saw it as a threat to their monopoly on printing work for artists. The "Original" printmakers saw it as a threat to their monopoly on high quality / high profit work. There was also the inevitable snobbery from those that attack any form of change: Trolls skulking behind the anonymity of the internet would trash the new process all over Art newsgroups and on their blogs. Cravat-wearing "traditional" artists would guffaw their opinion in restaurants, impressing diners at other tables with their monumental intellect by loudly ridiculing the ignorance of both "artists" using the new process and their customers. "Didn't they know that these weren't even "Prints" at all !" Not having been made on an ancient hand-cranked wooden contraption by peasants wearing smocks... "And Giclee isn't even a real word !! though is bears a passing resemblance to the pluperfect subjunctive interrogative past-participle of the ancient Breton "Giqhlerr" meaning "milking stool" or some such pretentious, unemployed art-student type twaddle. Put mildly, back in the 90s, the knives were out from all directions for this new process. Which, lets face it - was fair enough. New technology isn't any good until it's proven to be good. However, some of the more militant factions thought the best form of defence was offence, and decided to get their retaliation in first, as the old rugby saying goes. Giclee had to be bloody good if it was to prove itself. But Giclee has more than just proven itself: it's revolutionised the fine art print industry. Overwhelmingly in the favour of the buying public. Since the early days, the vast bulk of those detractors who actually have genuine employment in the Art or Print Trades (as opposed to "I have no actual experience of this, but I DO have an opinion about it") have quietly shut up - and gone out and bought, or got access to a digital print set-up. Giclee has meant an end to those ridiculous "limited edition" runs of 1500, or 2500, or a billion, where the buying public was palmed off with poor quality, mass-made litho prints masquerading as something exclusive. Limited editions now tend to be 200 or less, and are often available from small producers or individual artists such as ourselves, allowing buyers far greater choice than what's available from the big publishers. Far more variety - often riskier, edgier stuff the Big Boys in the print trade wouldn't touch with a barge-pole. There are very few art studios, professional artists or print companies that don't have access to some form of digital print set-up these days. Digital printing has been embraced by Gods of the Art World such as Gilbert and George and David Hockney. These are definitely not people that need to scam the uneducated for a quick buck! Admittedly, the cravat-wearing traditional artists will always be out there, spitting venom at anyone in the Art World that has made a living in a trade that they themselves could have succeeded so brilliantly in, if it weren't for the new fangled stuff like acrylic paint or the likes of Hirst, Emin, Hockney, Picasso, Van Goch and all the other money-grubbing artists with no respect for Tradition, and their stupid, uneducated, common-as-muck customers. Sooner or later, there'll be another breakthrough in the Art World. The silly buggers will be doubtless start bleating about that, too, when it happens. We're not attacking Bulk produced prints, nor traditional printmakers... It's just we don't suffer fools gladly. As for the cravat - wearing "traditional" artists, well:
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