About Quality Prints and the Giclee Process

The Traditional Way

Artists who have wished to produce limited edition prints have traditionally had to buy a lot of prints because, with the offset litho process, the difference in cost between a run of, say, 500 and another of 2,000 is not very great. The main part of the cost lies in the making of the printing plate and setting up the printing press. So many artists would have excess stocks of prints that they were unlikely to sell.

The Giclee Process

Then came the Giclee process (pronounced jeeclay with a soft j) which can produce as many or as few prints as the artist wants. The Giclee process comprises a very high definition photograph of the painting, which is converted to a digital image, and printed on an archival paper or canvas by a large inkjet printer, much like an overgrown desktop inkjet printer.

Desktop Inkjet prints versus Giclee prints

However, although the principal is the same for each printer, there are important differences:

 

The desktop inkjet printer is, of course, usually limited to A4 or A3 size prints wheras a giclee machine can print sheets of sizes up to A0 and even larger.The desktop printers use dyes which tend fade with time, especially if exposed to daylight. Floor standing giclee printers use pigmented inks specially developed to give longevity to the print which also demands an archival acid-free paper. Light stability is claimed to be between 70 and 200 years.Desktop printers usually use 3 coloured inks and one black ink (although recently, with the advent of digital photography, more inks are being used) whereas the giclee printer uses 7 or more colours plus various shades of grey and black.In many desktop printers, the 3 coloured inks are contained in a single cartridge so if, say, the yellow ink runs out first, the remainin ink pink and blue inks are wasted. In a Giclee printer inks are in separate cartridges, so minimising waste.Although many of modern inkjet printers can produce excellent results. Even at a close viewing distance, a Giclee print can be virtually indistinguishable from the original. The cost of a Giclee print, say A3, is many times the cost of the equivalent office inkjet. The cost of a Giclee printer runs into thousands of pounds whereas a desktop printer is usually well under £1,000.

So for limited edition prints, even the best home and office inkjet printers are useless. We aspire to supplying giclee prints directly and we can now do that to order.

 

Meanwhile, what about non-Giclee prints?

For our local market in the UK, we have been using a high quality reprographic machine to produce very acceptable prints. We have a number of these prints for sale which we are offering at a much lower price than a Giclee, but with a satisfaction guarantee. They are reasonably light stable and the colours are a good representation of the originals. We call these 'reprographic prints' and, for the time being, nearly all prints offered on this site are of this quality.

Should you require a proper Giclee print of any of Lester's images, please contact us  - we may well be able to help you.