Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is
an invented name for the process of making fine art prints
from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée"
is derived from the French language word "le gicleur"
meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to
squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined by Jack Duganne, a
printmaker working in the field, to represent any
inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of
that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris
proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were
producing on those same types of printers. The name was
originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris
printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has
since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is
often used in galleries and print shops to denote such
prints.Origins
The earliest prints to be called "Giclée"
were created in the early 1990s on the Iris Graphics models
3024 and 3047 continuous inkjet printers (the company was
later taken over by Scitex). Iris printers were originally
developed to produce prepress proofs from digital files for
jobs where color matching was critical such as product
containers and magazine publication. Their output was used
to check what the colors would look like before mass
production began. Much experimentation took place to try to
adapt the Iris printer to the production of color faithful,
aesthetically pleasing reproductions of artwork. Early Iris
prints were relatively fugitive and tended to show color
degradation after only a few years. The use of newer inksets
and printing substrates has extended the longevity and light
fastness of Iris prints.
Current
usage
Beside its association with Iris
prints, in the past few years, the word “giclée,” as a fine
art term, has come to be associated with prints using
fade-resistant "archival" inks (including solvent inks) and
the inkjet printers that use them. These printers use the
CMYK color process but may have multiple cartridges for
variations of each color based on the CcMmYK color model
(e.g. light magenta and light cyan inks in addition to
regular magenta and cyan); this increases the apparent
resolution and color gamut and allows smoother gradient
transitions. The most commonly-used printers are models from
manufacturers such as Canon, Eastman Kodak, Epson,
Hewlett-Packard, ITNH Ixia, Mimaki, Mutoh, ColorSpan, and
Roland DGA. A wide variety of substrates are available
including various textures and finishes such as matte photo
paper, watercolor paper, cotton canvas, or artist textured
vinyl. Indeed, a new industry has been created in supplying
the media for this emerging market.
Applications
Artists tend to use these types of
inkjet printing processes commonly called "Giclée" to make
reproductions of their original two-dimensional artwork,
photographs or computer generated art. Professionally
produced inkjet prints are much more expensive on a “per
print” basis than the traditional four color offset
lithography process originally used to make such
reproductions (a large format inkjet can cost more than $50
a print, not including scanning and color correction, as
opposed to $5 a print for a four-color offset litho of the
same image printed in a run of 1000). However, since the
artist does not need to pay for market and store large print
runs, and since the artist can print and sell each print
individually to match demand, inkjet printing is used as an
economical alternative to producing large runs of four color
offset prints. Inkjet printing has the added advantage of
allowing the artist to control every aspect of the image,
its color and the substrate printed on, and even allows the
artist to own and operate the printer itself. |
