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

artwork by contemporary British artist Mark Lloyd Williams

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WHAT'S GICLÉE ? It's an extremely high resolution archival printing technique. Seen as the absolute pinnacle of fine art reproduction methods at the moment. So good in fact, that it's considered the method of choice for Today's up-to-date bank-note forger !!

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


GICLEE: even magnified many times, image is in sharp focus, you can still see a lot of detail	TRADITIONAL PRINT: resolution is much poorer.

Basically, it's giant-format digital inkjet printing at extremely high precision, using dedicated equipment and the finest museum-grade inks and papers. Production of prints by this method is slow and laborious: the machine may take an hour or more to produce one print - a traditional press could produce thousands in that time. Giclee printing will never compare with traditional art-reproduction methods on price, but for quality it's unbeatable.

The word Giclée was invented a few years ago by the marketing guys at an American printing company as a posh trade name for their range of ultra high quality prints made on their shiny new IRIS inkjet printer (a monster of a machine originally intended for making perfect one-off proof/trial prints in the print industry). The term has now caught-on right through the printing and gallery trades. It's derived from the French word "gicler" (to squirt or spray... as in ink-jet... geddit ?) and it's pronounced "JEE-CLAY" You may hear inkjet art prints referred to variously as Giclée prints, IRIS prints, goulatette prints, pigment-ink prints and several others, but the name Giclée seems to have stuck throughout the trade.

NOTE: Giclee should not be compared or confused with "hand-made" printing techniques such as silk-screen (serigraphy), woodblock, etching or engraving. These are a totally different area of the art scene, hand-made prints are considered "originals" in their own right, as they are not copies of an original.

We have seen one or two artists and print companies describing giclee prints as "originals" this is misleading: Giclee is a reproduction technique. Giclee prints are not originals. Giclee prints are very, very good copies of originals.