GICLEE PRINTING

You might be interested in where the term "Giclee" was derived. One story has it that It was first suggested by a master printer in a fine art print shop on the west coast of the US in the 1990's. He was creating a portfolio of prints for an artist client on his Iris printer and was asked by his client what to call them when offering them for sale. To her it seemed too ordinary to refer to them as "ink jet" prints. The printer thought for a moment and then suggested the client return after he did some research. Knowing that many printmaking terms have been derived from the French language he searched a dictionary for something he could use. Finally he came across the French term "gicleur" which translates to "nozzle" in English. From that he made up the term "Giclee" to describe his high quality fine art prints. His client was delighted and began to refer to her high quality prints as Giclee's. Others began to hear this term and decided to use it also to describe their high quality prints made on this new generation of high end printers. From there the use of the term expanded until today when many artists, galleries and museums commonly refer to "Giclee" when speaking of their digitally produced high quality prints.

Giclee prints are intended to be the highest quality ink jet prints available. The term Giclee(pronounced"Zhee-clay") had in the 1990's become synonymous with the "Iris" printing process, but the Iris fine art printer is now no longer the only process to produce such high quality prints. In fact the machine is no longer made by Iris. Other printers have taken its place at the top end of fine art printing like Epson, Hewlett Packard, Mimaki, Mutoh, Roland, and Colorspan which is the printer that Stan uses.

Lithography and similar traditional printmaking processes depend upon printing from a stone or burning a plate from which an edition of prints are created. In the Giclee ink jet process an original piece of artwork can be scanned or photographed to create a high resolution digital image, and this image is then printed on a high end ink jet printer using a high quality acid free paper and UV resistant inks. The beauty of this process is that an edition of multiple prints is no longer necessary, as with a stored digital image new prints can be made at any time.

Below left is a black and white giclee print being printed by Stan for a local client, the History Center of Ithaca. This was created by scanning an old photograph, enhancing it in Adobe Photoshop, and printing it with 4 densities of black ink on a Hahnemuhle photo rag watercolor paper. On the right is a stretched canvas print on stretcher bars of a recent photo realist collage which Stan composed in 2004 in Photoshop.