Giclée

Peter Paul Rubens The Hippopotamus Hunt printed on paper and canvas stock with the seven Epson pigmented ink printer cartridges used to produce it (printer and prints commonly called Giclée).

Giclée ( /ʒiːˈkleɪ/ zhee-clay or /dʒiːˈkleɪ/), is a neologism coined in 1991 by printmaker Jack Duganne for fine art digital prints made on ink-jet printers. The name originally applied to fine art prints created on IRIS printers in a process invented in the late 1980s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used by artists, galleries, and print shops to denote such prints.

Origins

The word "giclée" was created by Jack Duganne, a print maker working at Nash Editions. He wanted a name for the new type of prints they were producing on the IRIS printer, a large format high resolution industrial prepress proofing ink-jet printer they had adapted for fine art printing. He was specifically looking for a word that would not have the negative connotations of "ink-jet" or "computer generated". To make the word descriptive of ink-jet technologies he based it on the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray".

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 (pigment based, as well as newer solvent based inks), and archival substrates primarily produced on Epson and some other types of large format printers. 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. 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.

Applications

Artists generally use inkjet printing 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 four-color offset lithography process traditionally used for such reproductions (a large-format inkjet print can cost more than $50, not including scanning and color correction, versus $5 for a four-color offset litho print of the same image in a run of 1000). Four-color offset lithographic presses have the disadvantage of the full job having to be set up and produced all at once in a mass edition. With inkjet printing the artist does not have to pay for the expensive printing plate setup or the marketing and storage needed for large four-color offset print runs. This allows the artist to follow a just-in-time business model in which inkjet printing can be an economical option, since he or she can print and sell each print individually in accordance with demand. Inkjet printing has the added advantage of allowing artists to take total control of the production of their images, including the final color correction and the substrates being used, and it is even feasible for individual artists to own and operate their own printers.

See also

• Canvas print
• CcMmYK color model
• Printmaking
• Archival Pigment Prints

External links

• Wired.com - The New Remasters
• What's In a Name: The True Story of "Giclée"