What Is Giclée? The highly qualified art printing technique, commonly known as the giclée printing process, started to grow in popularity as early as in 1986 in the United States. Jack Duganne, a very respected traditional American artist and fine art printmaker started as a pioneer in giclée printing after he was ashtonished by the first results he had made by the giclée process. The word Giclée ( pronounce as "zhjee-clay") has been derived from the French word "gicler", which means 'spraying' or 'spurting', to indicate a technique which uses non-interrupted streams of ink to get the four ink colors on the substrate. Because the word "Giclée" is not easy to pronounce for many people, the term Digital Fine Art Print or Iris Fine Art Print is also been used, referring to the manufacturer of the specially needed and very expensive drum printer, Iris Graphics (USA) How Giclée?
A close look on the sophisticated printhead	Four million drops per second are applied to the substrate from the color streams of high-pressure inks. Each droplet of ink is about the size of a red blood cell. Multiple droplets, in 30 various sizes, are overlaid to create a beautiful continuous tone reproduction, rather than the coarser dot pattern associated with offset lithographs.			EPSON 9600 (Ultrachrome™ pigmented inks) - printer we use
Why Giclée? As a new digital printmaking technique, giclées are capturing the hearts of many artists. Reasons for this vary, but the theme remains the same: quality! The first thing a connoisseur of a high quality limited art print will notice when judging our giclée prints are the intensive and rich colors, extremely fine details, beautiful sharpness, smooth colour transitions, good image depth, a painterly look and feeling on canvas, and a beautifull velvety look and feeling on watercolor papers. Giclées printed on the wide range of substrates, give you the impression you're dealing with an original piece of art instead of a top quality reproduction, because they are exceptional in quality... Many prominent artists produce their giclées, to mention a few, Frank Stella, Francesco Clemente, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Andrew Wyeth, John Baldessari. Likewise, many accomplished photographers are selling their work in Giclee editions: Richard Avedon, Joyce Tenneson, Pedro Meyer, Chuck Close, Olivia Parker, William Wegman, Greg Heisler, Joel Meyerowitz, and the landscape photographer Stephen Johnson. Literally, dozens of museums in the U.S. and abroad have either mounted exhibitions of Iris Giclees or purchased them for their permanent collections. These include The Metropolitan Museum (New York), the Guggenheim (New York), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), the Philadelphia Museum, the Butler Institute (Youngstown, OH), the Corcoran (DC), the National Gallery for Women in the Arts (DC), the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts (DC), the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the New York Public Library Print Collection, the High Museum (Atlanta), the California Museum of Photography, the National Museum of Mexico, and the San Jose Museum, among others. The retail price of any print–Giclee or other media–depends on many variables, such as the artist's reputation, the size of the edition, the size of the print, and even the state of the economy. Small-format Giclees from a large edition done by an emerging artist can sell for as little as $200-$300. At the other extreme, Giclees by David Hockney can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Typically, full-sized Giclees from limited editions, done by talented–but not internationally famous–artists, will carry a price tag ranging from $500-600 up to $2,000-$2,500.