Giclee (jhee-clay) -Definition of Giclee; Derived from the French verb gicler meaning to squirt, to spray. The term giclee print typically connotes a certain elevation in printmaking technology. A giclée is a high resolution digital print and is a recognized fine art print category like lithographs and serigraphs. Giclee is considered the world's best technique for reproducing original works of art and for printing digitally created art.
Giclee prints look and feel like original art. Prints are made on materials such as watercolor papers and canvas. Image permanence is a concern to artists and collectors. We use Hewlett-Packard inks which are very stable, giving fade & color shift resistance of 90 years on paper under average indoor light conditions. Giclee printmaking provides a luminosity and brilliance that represents the artist's original work better than any reproduction technique available today. Offset Lithography (i.e. commercial printing) is limited to the traditional 4-color process and is normally printed on 80 lb coated stock. This does not approach the quality of a Giclee printed on 100 percent rag paper using a 6-color process.
Offset lithographs are created by taking a continuous tone image and processing it through a screen. The result is an image created with a series of dots, each one proportional in size to the density of the original at the location of that dot. The human eye is consequently "tricked" into seeing something that approximates a continuous tone image. Most printed material such as newspapers and magazines are printed with this process. Serigraphs are really screen prints. These prints are made by creating a set of screens, each representing one color. Ink is then squeezed through the screen and onto the media. For fine art reproduction purposes, the number of screens required to approximate the tonal qualities of the original are typically from 20 to more than 100. The larger the number of screens, the closer a serigraph can appear to be continuous tone and the more expensive it is to produce.
Giclee prints have many advantages over both the offset lithograph and the serigraph. The color available for giclee processing is limited only by the color gamut of the inks themselves. Therefore, literally millions of colors are available and the limitation imposed by the screening process does not exist. The giclee process uses such small dots and so many of them that they are not discernible to the eye. A giclee print is essentially a continuous tone print showing every color and tonal shift. Giclee are printed on beautiful fine art papers, and the result is a print befitting the definition of fine art in every way.