Giclée for your Fine Art Prints
Giclée , commonly pronounced "zhee-clay," is an invented term for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word “giclée”, from the French language word "gicleur" meaning "nozzle", was created by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet based digital print used as fine art
Earlier Commercial inkjet based prints were relatively fugitive and tended to show color degradation after only a few years. With continued development of Commercial inkjet based prints, over the past few years, the word “giclée”, as a fine art term, has come to be associated with prints using fade resistant "archival" inks and the printers that use them.
Artists tend to use these types of "Giclée" printing processes to make limited edition high end reproductions of their original two dimensional artwork, photographs, or computer generated art. Giclée style prints can be much more expensive on a “per print” basis than the traditional four color offset lithography process originally used to make such reproductions. Since the artist does not need pay for, market, and store large print runs, and since the artist can print and sell each print individually to match demand, "Giclée" can be an economical alternative when producing limited print editions.
