Print Quality

Giclee, pronounced (zhee-CLAY), is a French verb meaning “to spray” as in pigment inks out of a crazy high tech enormous ink jet printer that costs as much as a Mercedes.

Giclees the noun are fine art prints created using a high resolution digital file obtained by either carefully scanning the original artwork on an tightly calibrated iris scanner that costs as much as some homes, or by taking a professional digital photograph. The high resolution digital file is then color matched to the original for hours and hours and hours…. Trust me on this one. And finally, and this is the really fun part, waiting for it to be printed out on the large format six to eight color highly sophisticated ink jet printer that lays the pigment ink onto the archival paper as accurately as though it were the original! My big paintings take twenty or thirty minutes a piece to finally emerge from the printer.

All of the original textures and subtleties of the depth of color in the original artwork are captured with the deeply saturating inks each and every time it is reproduced. Its really quite amazing. The inks lay on top of the paper so similarly to the actual watercolor that sometimes I like the reproductions better. Its all about the quality of the initial scan, the quality of the paper and the quality of the ink. The right high quality combination can last a very long time.