Black Mountain Gallery contemporary art by Mark Lloyd Williams & Muriel Williams

what is a giclee print ?

"giclee" is a print-trade / art trade slang term for extremely high resolution inkjet printing used for reproduction of existing artwork such as paintings or photographs.

As a new technique, there was some initial scepticism over the glowing claims made about it. But over the past few years it has more than proved itself and has become universally accepted as the highest quality method currently available for reproduction of existing artwork.

Its advantages over the older machine-process for producing repro prints, high speed lithography, are incredible sharpness of detail, vivid colours and no tiny dots visible in the image. It also is capable of printing on high quality materials like hand-made paper or even canvas. . Giclee prints are exceptionally fade-resistant. In average lighting conditions, they have a life of many decades.

Below are a couple of highly magnified areas from a giclee print and an offset-litho print for comparison. (please note the resolution of the actual paper print is drastically greater than these screenshots.)

how does it work ? It's simply giant-format digital inkjet printing at extremely high precision, using specialised equipment and museum-grade inks and papers. A print head containing microscopic spray-nozzles passes over the paper again and again, spraying it with ink slowly building up the image after several thousand passes. It may take an hour or more to produce a single print in this way.

The word "giclee" - pronounced "JEE-CLAY" was invented a few years ago by the marketing bods at one of the publishing companies as a rather posh-sounding trade name for their top-end fine art prints. It's derived from the French word for spray (as in ink-jet). The name has caught on throughout the printing, publishing and art gallery trades as a slang term for "bloody good quality" because it's less of a mouthful than "high quality digitally mastered inkjet reproduction made using fade-resistant ink and acid-free museum grade paper"

In theory, it's the same technology as a desk-top printer uses. In practice, to get superb quality over the huge area required needs a very large, expensive machine loaded with "archival" grade ink (sometimes called "pigment" or "cave-paint" ink, in reference to its longevity). Probably the most critical step in Giclee printing is the creation of the digital image file. Even a professional off-the-shelf digital camera is nowhere near good enough. The fine art repro trade uses either giant format scanning or a large-format camera fitted with a scan back: a CCD device capable of recording straight to a hard drive. Typically, one of our images would be in the several hundred megapixel to gigapixel range.

made properly, giclee prints can be of a quality that will take your breath away: but beware. There is a small trade in "fake" giclee prints generally made by well-meaning but unwitting hobby artists. These are usually knocked off using DIY equipment from PC World and photocopier paper. These are a right pain in the arse to professionals. Reputable galleries won't touch amateur prints with a bargepole (they invariably fade, or the paper degrades and curls within weeks or months) but you will see lots on eBay, at craft fairs and "gift-shop" type outlets - the sort of places that sell dreamcatchers and fluffy toys as well as "art". It's invariably in either A3 or A4 format - the size of a home/office copier/printer. You have been warned !

Just to be balanced, we wish to make it clear giclee prints are not original artworks. Neither are they "original prints". Whilst almost all professional printmakers will welcome any new addition to their toolbox, giclee has caused quite a bit of controversy in "The Trade" This is mainly down to the fact that some of the big print companies are using their mega-budgets to market giclee prints almost as original works of art, with an almost mystical perception of rarity, and a price tag to match. To be perfectly honest, we believe the practice of asking many hundreds or even thousands of pounds for something the artist has had no contact with, apart from the addition of a quick pencil signature is the work of the accomplished spiv scamming the sucker: Like they say, a fool and his money are easily parted.

Our business model is that we like to have lots of people own our work, so for unlimited edition giclee prints, we don't charge a lot. That way, everyone gets to own something of seriously good quality at a bargain price.

An "original" print is one which is made by hand using a traditional technique such as silkscreen or copper-plate etching, where the is no original artwork as such to be copied, the print itself is the original: Yes, that's confusing, but a couple of examples of "original" print-making techniques will show what we mean:

Silkscreen printing works by using a stencil cut into the shape of the desired design stretched over an ink-soaked piece of fabric (silk). This is used to imprint the shape of that stencil onto the paper.

Copper plate etching works by burning a design into a copper plate using acids. The plate can then be inked, and pressed into a sheet of damp paper using a roller press. This gives an image with fabulously sharp yet subtle detail. In both these cases, there's no real "original" to be copied, the process itself produces the original. These are just two examples of "original" printing techniques. There are many more. Each produces work with a wonderful characteristic "feel" and appearance.

As of January 2010, all our limited edition prints are created using "hand - made" techniques. Giclee is without doubt the best technique for reproduction of paintings - But as these wonderful traditional techniques demand so much more in the way of "blood, sweat and tears" we'll be reserving them for our limited edition work.

giclee definition

"Hazy Sun" is an original silk screen print I produced in 1999. It has 8 colours, so each print was printed 8 times with 8 different silk screens, each with a different stencil, layering one colour on the image at a time.

30 prints were made. 6 were rejected and destroyed due to faults (like accidental fingerprints, poor screen register, etc.) and 21 were sold. I retain 3 as artists proofs which are not for sale