What is Giclée?
Giclée (pronounced zhee-clay) is a French word meaning ‘to spray in'. The term was adopted by the art world to describe a new way of producing high quality, two dimensional art utilizing the technology of computers. The term refers to a method of applying the paint or ink onto the canvas or paper to produce the final piece of artwork.

Many artists have begun to paint their original creations directly on a digital drawing board, using digital paint brushes. Paintings already created on canvas or paper by the older, traditional methods may be copied and recreated in giclee.

The procedure for copying a painting done originally with paint on canvas or paper consists of taking a high quality photograph, usually a 4x5 inch or larger transparency, and then scanning that transparency into a sophisticated scanner to digitize the image and create a computer file. The purpose was to print the picture using newly developed, high end ink jet printers designed to produce extremely fine dots in a resolution greater than that possible from normal printing processes.

Bear in mind, also, that the common home or office ink jet printer uses an ink that will fade quickly when exposed to sunlight or even bright room light. The Giclée printers use very expensive paints that are archival quality. Some of the manufacturers claiming 200 years or more before any fading takes place.

One of the big advantages of the Giclée process is that it is now economically feasible to print only only one painting or reproduction at a time.

A second big advantage of Giclée is that once the art has been digitized, it can be printed in various sizes to suit a particular art buyer. With the printing press, each copy had to be the same size.

Giclée prints can be made on almost any kind of material including normal fine water color paper, canvas, and specially treated materials which enhance the brilliance of the colors.

Think of the Giclée printer as a set of four or more air brushes, all working at the same time, spraying approximately 4 million microscopic droplets of ink per second onto the artist's media. These air brushes spray the same printing colors used in commercial printing, cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The proper mixture of these four colors can produce up to 16 million colors. All of this is controlled by the computer.

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