About Giclèe Printing

Giclèe (pronounced “ghe-clay”) printing made its debut in 1985. Many influential artists have incorporated it into their own artistic endeavors including Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, and Jamie Wyeth. Museums realise Giclèe's vast potential and have made many Giclèe editions a permanent part of their collections. Some of these include the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Museum of Contempory Art, (Los Angeles), The Philadelphia Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco).

Inks & Paper

What these artists and influential institutions value in a Giclée print is an excellent high quality method of printing that truly captures the artist's original intent. While the process follows the same stages as traditional printing, the methods used in a Giclèe print are very complex and time consuming. The strong interpretive power of a Giclèe is, in part, due to the quality of the inks, which are optimized for fine art applications and have been extensively researched to produce the longest lasting colorfast inks.

The quality of paper and canvas that is used in Giclèe printing is also an extremely important factor. We use only the finest rag papers that are made in Europe on antique machinery in very old mills, because the paper that a Giclèe is printed adds immensely to the value and quality of the print. The paper's weight and content makes the difference in the way a print looks, feels and ages and therefore is one of the foremost considerations for the publisher during the printing process, especially in terms of what best interprets the original artwork. The canvas that we use is also an archival canvas that is specially treated to give the image permanence, along with an incredible color gamut.

Precision Printing

The Giclèe printer is a digital printer that uses ink jet technology whereby microscopic droplets of ink are placed with great precision onto a surface. The image consists of pixels (or dots) that are formed by these droplets in combinations of each of the eight colors used (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, light cyan, light magenta, orange and green). Data from the computer instructs the printer as to how many droplets of each color are placed within each given dot. The dots are each so small and precise (each droplet can only be seen through a microscope) that instead of seeing dots, the human eye only registers a slow tonal gradation. Each nozzle of ink produces up to one million droplets per second onto the paper, which is an amazing testament to the intense precise calibration and mechanical accuracy that Giclèe printing is capable of.

Courtesy Carol Hagan Studios

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