Giclée Prints- Details 
Giclée on fine art watercolor paper prints, using archival inks, are meant to be framed, and can be displayed under glass with acid-free matte boards.

Giclée on coated canvas prints look and feel just like original oil paintings, and are meant to be stretched on canvas stretcher-bars (a service offered by most good framers) and framed without glass or matte boards.

Giclée prints cost more than other kinds of fine art reproductions (the unit cost to produce Giclée prints is 20 to 30 times more than other kinds of reproduction). They are, however, the most beautiful art prints in the world.

Each print will be created individually for you, at the time of order. Giclée prints are shipped rolled, in very sturdy shipping tubes. All prices include shipping.

A Short History of Iris Giclée Printing
Artists have been appropriating commercial printing technology since it was first developed. When Durer produced etchings of his images, and used the prints as individual works of art, it was as outrageous as Warhol or Lichtenstein appropriating color lithography to produce Pop Art in the early 1960s. 

Iris technology was first developed as a proofing process for digital prepress applications, and remains the ultimate soft proof in the digital workflow. The high quality of the process was noticed in the mid 1980s by pioneers of Giclée printing like Graham Nash and Jon Cone, who then developed inks that expanded the color gamut and longevity of the print. Iris printing became a viable fine arts medium because of their seminal work.

The list of artists using Iris Giclée technology is diverse. It includes artists who have always pioneered in the use of new printing technologies like Robert Rauschenburg, who produced Iris prints for his Guggenheim New York show in 1997, artists associated with painting such as Chuck Close, traditional printmakers like Vija Celmins, and photographers including William Wegman, Harry Callahan, Joel Meyerowitz, and Lee Friedlander. The attraction of a new medium that permits experimentation in the digital realm without compromising the quality of the resulting print is a powerful draw for artists of our time.

The Iris/Giclée Print 
With the advent of the Giclée, the art of fine art printing has become even more precise. Because no screens are used, the prints have a higher apparent resolution than lithographs. The dynamic color range is like a serigraph. In the Giclée process, a fine stream of ink - more than four million droplets per second - is sprayed onto archival art paper or canvas. The effect is similar to an airbrush technique but much finer. Each piece is carefully hand mounted onto a drum which rotates during printing. Exact calculations of hue, value and density direct the ink of four nozzles. This produces a combination of 512 chromatic changes, (with over 3 million colors possible) of highly saturated, nontoxic water-based ink. The artist's color approval and input are essential for creating the final custom setting for the edition. 

The latest advancements in the Giclée process are the work of a sophisticated fine art production facility that utilizes the highest resolution digital printers. This edition of fine art prints is a collaboration between the artist and a specially trained printing craftsman. They have extended the boundaries of current technology by customizing their equipment, designing new programs, and offering protective coatings to ensure quality standards for the collector. 

Displaying a full color spectrum, Giclée prints capture every nuance of an original painting - be it watercolor, oil or acrylic and have gained wide acceptance from artists like David Hockney and Robert Rauschenberg to major institutions like the Chicago Art Institute and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.