Giclée Prints

The finest large-format digital printers achieve such high quality output that virtually a new branch of artwork has emerged - the modern Giclée print. Like others, I was astonished when I first saw the results. In some respects it is possible to appreciate the print above the original. This may have something to do with the overall sense of harmony created by the perfectly matched pigments of the printing inks, and the velvet lustre these lovely colours create on the print surface, and the evenness and thematic coherence that is produced. Additionally, the satin purity of the heavy fine art paper conveys a sense of clean elegance. It is also possible to print onto other substrates, and canvas prints are available.

A matter of significance for both the artist and his patrons is that the final print should express his own intentions, and not simply those of the printer or the effects of the process. To this end once I have painted my pictures and they have been scanned I print them on my own state-of-the-art machine which allows me to control the whole process in my own studio to my own standards. There are many delicate and pleasing alterations that an artist can make at this final stage.

Longevity, also, is an important consideration. I use only Fine Art paper or canvas of the highest quality - heavy weight (minimum 300gsm), purest texture, and of archival standard. The solid pigments my printer uses are the best that current technology can produce, and in independent tests have been found to have a permanence (mounted under glass and away from direct sunlight) of more than two hundred years without the least alteration - three times longer than is the case with the vast majority of the best fine art prints found in the galleries today.

A Giclée print is not a mass-production item. When all the necessary adjustments have been made to ensure artistic fidelity, it can take up to an hour for the machine to create one large print. The graphic files produced by minutely accurate scanning of the originals are in the region of well over 300mb for the larger pictures - about one hundred times more information-rich than a normal quality digital photograph. The printer I use has twelve pigmented inks to give the broadest gamut of colour, deepest contrast, finest greyscale, and warmest intensity of saturation. The inks emerge from the printhead in a stream of droplets not much larger than a haemoglobin molecule, each one electrically charged and directed by a computer to its precise location on the print. The result is a picture that bears every trace of the original and no trace of how it has been made.

HP Design Jet Z3100 - print permanence ratings 

Giclee prints | mounting prints