What is a Giclée Print and how can Artists make a continued income from it?
Due to a large number of our customers asking if we produce Giclée prints and what are they exactly, we thought we would briefly go over some of the processes involved in producing one.
So let’s start with the process we go through at Wall Art in producing a Giclée/fine art print.
The following paintings are from one of our existing artists Lisa Parkyn
Step 1. We take an artist’s original piece of work (painting,) usually produced on a canvas or water colour rag paper, this is then put through our calibrated fine art scanner at a very high resolution which gives us a high quality digital raster file to start working with.
Photoshop colour adjusting
Step 2. The digital file is imported into Photoshop this is where all the magic happens! We start by printing out our first test copy. We print this on the same high quality paper that our final print will be produced on. This copy is then compared to the original, at this point the colours will usually be quite far off so we go back to Photoshop, and start to make little colour adjustments. After each adjustment we produce a print and this process continues until we have a colour match with the original.
Image printing and colour adjustments
Step 3. We are now ready to produce a final print. Here at Wall Art we have many different medias we use but for Giclée, we prefer to use one of our heavy fine art/rag papers rather than a canvas, as paper has a much higher white content than canvas, which helps in producing a vivid print. All our machines run a 12 colour ink system, which currently at the time of writing, gives the widest colour gamut available and comes with the added benefit of being lightfast, which means they will not fade.
Final print production
Step 4. So to sum it up a Giclée print is a very high quality print, which is usually a service used by artists/photographers to produce either limited or open edition prints on a print on demand service. It is an excellent way for an artist to continue making a revenue from an original painting long after it has been sold.
We hope this has helped explain the process involved so you can take this information to your local printers and find out how they can help you increase revenue as an artist.
