Giclée is a neologismcoined in 1991 by printmaker Jack Duganne for fine artdigital prints made on inkjet printers. The name originally applied to fine art prints created on a modified Iris printer in a process invented in the late 1980s. It has since been used loosely to mean any fine-art, most of the time archival, printed by inkjet. It is often used by artists, galleries, and print shops to suggest high quality printing, but since it is an unregulated word it has no associated warranty of quality.
Origins
The word giclée was adopted by Jack Duganne around 1990. He was a printmaker working at Nash Editions. He wanted a name for the new type of prints they were producing on a modified Iris printer, a large-format, high-resolution industrial prepress proofinginkjet printer on which the paper receiving the ink is attached to a rotating drum and that they had adapted for fine-art printing. He was specifically looking for a word that would differentiate them from regular commercial Iris prints then used as proofs in the commercial printing industry. Giclée is based on the French wordgicleur, the Frenchtechnical term for a jet or a nozzle, and the verb coming from it gicler. Une giclée means a spurt of some liquid. The French verb form gicler means to spray, spout, or squirt. Duganne settled on the noungiclée.
Current usage
Besides its original association with Iris prints, the wordgiclée has come to be somewhat loosely associated with other types of inkjet printing including processes that use dyes or fade-resistant, archival inks, and archival substrates primarily produced on Canon, Epson, HP and other large-format printers. These printers use the CMYK color process as a base with additional color cartridges for smoother gradient transitions, up to 12 different inks in top model printers ; red, green, blue ) to achieve larger color gamut. A wide variety of substrates on which an image can be printed with such inks is available, including various textures and finishes such as matte photo paper, watercolor paper, cotton canvas, pre-coated canvas, or artist textured vinyl.
Applications
Artists generally use inkjet printing to make reproductions of their original two-dimensional artwork, photographs, or computer-generated art. Professionally produced inkjet prints are much more expensive on a per-print basis than the four-color offset lithography process traditionally used for such reproductions. Four-color offset lithographic presses have the disadvantage of the full job having to be set up and produced all at once in a mass edition. With inkjet printing the artist does not have to pay for the expensive printing plate setup or the marketing and storage needed for large four-color offset print runs. This allows the artist to follow a just-in-timebusiness model in which inkjet printing can be an economical option, since art can be printed and sold individually in accordance with demand. Inkjet printing has the added advantage of allowing artists to take total control of the production of their images, including the final color correction and the substrates being used. As a result numerous individual artists own and operate their own printers.
