What Are Giclée Prints?

Giclée (pronounced Gee Clay) is a French word meaning "to squirt or spurt." The Giclée printer squirts approximately 4 million microscopic droplets of ink per second onto 100% cotton fiber paper or other media. The four Giclée printing colors, cyan, magenta, yellow and black, can produce up to 16 million colors.

In Giclée printing, no screen or other mechanical devices are used and therefore there is no visible dot screen pattern. The image has all the tonalities and hues of the original painting. Giclée printers are a little over a meter wide and are often affectionately referred to as a "knitting machine," as they look very similar.

Giclées are made by scanning an image into a computer or creating a work of art using the computer and printing it using hi-tech ink jet printers. The colors produced from this method are highly vibrant and true to those in the original painting. The Giclée prints I have produced are printed on acid free watercolor paper, and have a gorgeous "rich" feel to them - especially large ones in beautiful frames!

Do Giclee printers use ordinary printer inks?

No. They use special light-fast inks, which, if kept out of the sun, will remain true for up to 65 years. The way the image is scanned is different also. The original is scanned directly on a drum scanner. Some images can be as large as 500 x 700 mm.

Giclée versus Lithograph

All original lithograph prints are numbered, and for a very specific purpose. The equipment used to produce a lithograph: the stencil, the lino cut, the plate, etc., ages during the printing process, and the later prints have differences to the earlier prints. A 1/100, therefore, would be worth more than a 10/100, and definitely more than a 100/100 of the same print by the same artist.

But every Giclée in an edition has the potential to be exactly the same as all the others. Additionally, in methods of print making other than Giclées, the plates used for reproducing the limited edition print were often destroyed and it was highly expensive and very difficult to make any more reproductions of the print. This is in direct contrast to Giclées where the print is generally kept on a computer file, and another batch of prints can be produced of exactly the same picture. In fact, there is the possibility that because of the way that Giclées are reproduced, someone owning Giclée equipment can scan a Giclée and make their own illegal reproductions. This possibility of illegal reproduction of Giclées is why all of my Giclées come with a Certificate of Authenticity.