Giclée printing :: Surrealist Art | Paintings & Drawings | Murals | Photos

About Giclées

- Giclée :: Digital Pigment Printing -

Giclee is a modern printmaking process in which individual prints are produced
on a special large-format printer in extremely high resolution, to give as exact as possible
a reproduction of the precise colors and strokes of the original work.
The giclée process offers the highest-quality reproduction available.

Giclées may be printed on paper or on canvas, each one printed individually.
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We offer the following products
(stretched or unstretched):
1- Original oil paintings on canvas
2- Hand enhanced Giclées
3- Decorative Giclees

2 - Hand enhanced Giclee:
Giclee that the artist has individually enhanced by hand,
adding detail and depth, and color by painting directly onto the print, making it an individual
expression of the artist's hand and eye, making each print unique at an affordable price.
Each Hand enhanced Giclee is numbered and hand-signed by the artist,
and come with a Certificate of Authenticity.
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3 - Decorative Giclee:
However, unlike the limited edition prints, these would simply be high-quality reproductions and would not be hand signed or enhanced. A decorative giclée might cost anywhere from $300 to $500. It would be purchased by someone who might not want to risk hanging a valuable enhanced or limited-edition print in a shared space, or who simply liked the "look" of the artwork but chose not to purchase a more valuable print.
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Our prints are hand signed by the artist, and each come
with a Certificate of Authenticity outlining the details of the reproduction.

We use the very best support: Hahnemühle Canvas Artist Satin to reproduce the paintings and
Hahnemühle Museum Etching to reproduce the drawings.

The superior quality of these giclée prints are combined with the human touch (from the artist himself)
of hand-embellishments to give the look of an original fine art image at a more affordable price.

Each print is professionally UV coated and can be stretched
on an inner wooden frame, to replicate the beauty of an original painting.

The "Giclee" (pronounced 'zhee-clay', a French term meaning 'spray of ink') printmaking method was originally developed in 1989 with the introduction of the Iris digital printer. In this process, a fine stream of ink, more than four million droplets per second, is sprayed onto archival art paper or canvas.

Each piece of paper or canvas is hand mounted onto a drum which rotates during printing. The effect is similar to an airbrush technique, but the Giclee droplets are over 35 times finer. The process of printing the Giclee can be a long one, and can take several hours to an entire day to produce one fine art print. Because no screens are used, the Giclee fine art prints have a higher resolution than lithographs, resulting in stronger contrast and richer colour saturation.

Testing of the inks, in combination with the fine art mediums used, has shown that these art prints last longer than those produced from traditional offset lithography. Archivability of up to 100 years can be expected according to accelerated aging tests.

Giclee fine art prints have been shown in exhibitions and purchased for permanent collections in museums and galleries throughout the world, including the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art, the Chelsea Galleriesand and The Smithsonian.

Recent auctions of giclee prints have fetched $10,800 for Annie Leibovitz, $9,600 for Chuck Close, and $22,800 for Wolfgang Tillmans (April 23/24 2004, Photographs, New York, Phillips de Pury & Company.)