What is a Giclee Print?

 

A giclee (zhee-CLAY) is an individually produced, high-resolution, high-fidelity reproduction done on a special large format printer. Giclees are produced from digital scans of my oil paintings. The size of the print is exactly the size of the original oil painting.

The easiest way to purchase one of my prints is to order it unframed (click here to see sample unframed print). This allows you to chose a frame suitable to you and also saves on delivery costs.

 

 

Having completed my oil painting I place it in the scanner. The scan of my original oil painting holds information about the canvas as well as all the brush strokes and colour and even glossiness. All this information comes out in the print.

I use a high quality heavy water colour paper. If I were to use a canvas paper the two canvasses would clash and look very odd.

The inks are also of the best quality, designed for art prints and with high resistance to fading from exposure to light.

The prints can either be framed under glass or varnished and then framed without glass (click here for illustrations). The varnish protects the print in a similar way to a traditional varnish on oils. An unvarnished print needs some protection, rather like a water colour.

Giclees use inkjet technology, but far more sophisticated than your desktop printer. The process employs six colors--light cyan, cyan, light magenta, magenta, yellow and black--of lightfast, pigmented inks and finer, more numerous, and replaceable printheads resulting in a wider color gamut, and the ability to use various media to print on. The ink is sprayed onto the page, actually mixing the color on the page to create true shades and hues.