Giclee - The Process

Giclee- Gee'clay- French term meaning to spray or squirt.

Giclee is the process used to reproduce works of art by spraying inks on paper or canvas. Giclee captures the color, depth and texture of primary works of art by combining high-end photography and high-tech, large scale, inkjet printers with archival inks and high capability artist papers or canvas. Giclee prints can be so close to the primary artwork that a high-powered jeweler's loop would be needed to tell the difference. Integrate this with the advantage of being the most flexible and cost effective way of reproducing artwork with higher resolution than lithography and a wider color range than a serigraph, the Giclee process is the best way to reproduce artwork today.

Printer Inkjet

The first step in the Gicleeprocess is to capture the image from primary artwork with a high resolution scanner. The Cruse Cs285 St

Is the highest resolution scanner in the world. It is produces a level of clarity and depth of detail never seen before in digital reproduction. The capability of a giclee print depends on the capture and that means the lighting. The Cruse Cs285 St scanner uses the Synchrome(Tm) lighting system. The Synchron lighting ideas uses a patented bright lamp design that provides even illumination over the entire surface of the primary art and eliminates the need for retouching. When the work is scanned it produces files with sizes up to 800 megabytes. State of the art technology guided by a technician with an artistic eye and practical skill to match and carry on colors that have been reduced to bits and bytes of data produce prints that stand out in quality.

The cornerstone of the Giclee process that makes it inherent to reproduce works with such unerring accuracy is the enhanced digital inkjet printer. These printers spray millions of droplets of ink per second onto canvas or artist paper. The ink spray is very fine and are sprayed at a rate of 4 million dots per second. The accomplished image is made up of about 20 billion dots of ink. The archival inks used are water-based and saturated, capable of producing 12 chromatic changes and more than 3 million colors.

The flexibility of the Giclee process is leading because after the scan is made, prints can be printed one at a time and in any range of sizes from very small to very big. I have made prints of the same piece of work from eleven inches in height to 8 feet. Either small or big all the prints are archival and high quality, so close to the primary that it is impossible to tell with the naked eye that they are reproductions.

Giclee - The Process