Giclee (Giclée)

Origins

The earliest paintings to be called "Giclee (Giclée)" were created in the early 1990s on the Iris Graphics models 3024, 3047, 4012 or "Realist" colour drum piezo-head inkjet painters (the company was later taken over by Scitex). Iris painters were originally developed to produce prepress proofs from digital files for jobs where color matching was critical such as product containers and magazine publication. Their output was used to check what the colors would look like before mass production began. There was much experimentation that took place to try to adapt the Iris painter to the production of color faithful, aesthetically pleasing reproductions of artwork. Early Iris paintings were relatively fugitive and tended to show color degradation after only a few years. The use of newer inksets and painting substrates have extended the longevity and light fastness of Iris paintings.For further information on the origins of fine art Iris painting see Iris painter and Graham Nash/Nash Editions
　

Current

state of the artBeside continued development of Iris paintings, in the past few years, the word “Giclee (Giclée)”, as a fine art term, has come to be associated with paintings using fade resistant "archival" inks and the painters that use them. These painters use the CMYK color process but may have multiple cartridges for variations of each color allowing them to reach a larger color gamut. The most common painters used are models from manufacturers such as Canon, Eastman Kodak, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, ITNH Ixia, Mimaki, Mutoh, ColorSpan, and Roland DGA.

Applications

Artists tend to use these types of "Giclee (Giclée)" painting processes to make limited edition high end reproductions of their original two dimensional artwork, photographs, or computer generated art. Giclee (Giclée) style paintings are much more expensive on a “per paint” basis than the traditional four color offset lithography process originally used to make such reproductions (a large Giclee (Giclée) can cost over $50 per paint not including scanning and color correction as opposed to $5 per paint for a four color offset litho of the same image painted in a run of 1000). But since the artist does not need pay for, market, and store large paint runs, and since the artist can paint and sell each paint individually to match demand, "Giclee (Giclée)" can be an economical alternative when producing limited paint editions. Giclee (Giclée) style painting has the added advantage of allowing the artist to control every aspect of the image, its color, the substrate painted on, and even allows the artist to own and operate the painter itself. Because of this, Giclee (Giclée) style paintings can technically be called “paintings”, i.e. an image where the artist has a hand in actual production.