A new opportunity to profit!

What is "Giclée Printing"?

This new fine art printing technology called "Giclée Printing" has taken the art world by storm and is presenting printers with a great new opportunity to diversify their revenue stream. Artists seeking reproductions of their artwork are now looking for print-on-demand solutions, as the sale of their artwork dictates.

Giclée is the French verb meaning "to spray" (as from a nozzle), and this describes perfectly the manner in which the inks are dispersed onto the substrate in the digital printing process. The main intention of the word Giclée was to distinguish "fine art prints" from those created for non-art or commercial purposes. Today the term "giclée" is commonly used by artists to describe a fine art print produced by the inkjet printing method.

These images are generally printed onto fine art paper or canvas, then framed. Artists can have their original paintings scanned and printed in the same way to create limited-edition prints for a fraction of the cost of traditional printing. The growing interest in Giclée has created dozens of 'fine art printing' companies.

Giclée is an advanced "state of the art" printing method that closely replicates original paintings in all aspects. Giclée prints have great advantages in beauty, quality and durability. The process can be used to print artwork that's been captured from the original painting, photography or digital artwork. Artists can produce several prints, hand embellish them, sign and number them, and then sell them. They can produce small numbers at a time, and always be ready to produce more. It's a print on demand system!

Here's the process and how it works

The first step is to "digitize" the artwork by using a Hi-end film camera or "scanner" to produce a raw or tiff image file. You can also take a digital picture with a high-end digital SLR camera. When using any camera, a proper lighting set-up is critical to achieving good results. I've found that, when reproducing an oil or acrylic painting which had a lot of texture to the paint, you'd be wise to spend a little extra time to get the lighting just right to enhance the 3D effect. I've had customers' faces six inches away from these kinds of prints and wonder if they were the originals – that's how good they looked! If you don't have access to a hi-resolution scanner or camera, consider out-sourcing this service to a photo studio.

Next, load the digitized picture into a graphics program such as Photoshop to size, crop, modify background, do color adjustments and "clean up" the image. All adjustments are done in this step.

Now you're ready to print the picture. You should first print two small 5" x 7" test prints to ensure that you have correct color settings. This also gives the customer two options to choose from. Check the printer settings to ensure the output quality is what you're looking for. For example, Canon printers have profiles built into their driver, so that when you match the paper with the profile in the driver, you get excellent results right off the bat, without having to create custom profiles (although anyone doing any kind of serious work will wish to create a custom profile for the paper or canvas they wish to use).

After the customer has approved the test print, you may print on canvas or watercolor paper, as many prints as are requested. Keep the digital file well stored so when the customer requires more prints, you'll be ready.

Giclée Finishing

Giclée prints can be prematurely damaged if exposed to moisture or UV rays, so you'd be wise to treat the surface after letting the print cure for at least 24 hours. The inks are water based and will smear if liquids are accidentally splashed on the surface. Apply a spray inkjet liquid laminate over the artwork. It will not only protect the print, but it will give it a lovely "work of art" finish.

Research before investing

You can spend up to $85,000 for a wide-format Giclée digital printer, or you can spend as little as $2,499 for the all new Canon ipf5000 17" 12 color printer. With all the preliminary results I have seen so far, it looks like Canon is ready to take digital inkjet printing to the next level. You're welcome to e-mail me if you have any further questions.

Peter DulisWide Format Printing Specialist

647-895-3315

pdulis@iprimus.ca