Every artist who sells original artwork knows that selling your work is a loss of pride and joy. Imagine being able to reproduce your most valuable pieces on demand and then selling them as art prints of very high quality, often on the exact media they were created on.
Now you have unlimited possibilities to increase the revenue generated by your work. You can also market your work by selling giclee fine arts prints, which are made from your original artwork.
Print on demand
Digital printing is a great option for artists and publishers because the editions can be printed immediately after print orders are received.
Giclee images created from your original paintings or watercolours are stored as a digital file that can be used whenever you need them.
A backup copy of your image file can also be saved so you can easily call up single copies or multiple copies. This helps you avoid having to print a whole edition.
Archival quality printing
To reproduce prints in large runs, artists used screen-printing and offset lithography.
Giclee Printing describes a printing method that utilizes a digitized image, which is sent from a computer and printed on a large format inkjet printer. The French term for “spray” is the origin of the term “giclee”. Jack Duganne was the first person to use the term. It refers to an inkjet-based, digital print that can be used as fine arts.
Fine art giclee print must be made on high quality, archival-quality coated paper and printed using pigment-based archival dyes that are UV stable. The Fine Art Trade Guild established minimum standards for giclee prints. They must score 6 or higher on the Blue Wool Scale, which measures light fastness. To avoid discolouration, they should have an acidity of pH7 to pH9.
Giclée prints are made from high-quality canvas and paper. Hahnemuhle Fine art Paper Mills has been producing mould made artist paper for over 435 year and offers a large selection of fine art papers suitable for giclee printing. The end result will be a fantastic giclee printing, often using the same media and original artwork.
A typical giclee printing machine will use 12 colour pigment-based ink sets to produce high-quality colour reproduction using neutral greys. This includes red, blue, green and magenta as well as yellow and regular black.
A giclee printing made with pigment inks may be lightfast for up 100+ years. This depends on paper type and storage conditions. The archival properties for giclee prints are much better than those made with traditional silkscreen or other litho prints by using pigment-based inks.
Digitizing or scanning your art work
Your original artwork or painting should be digitalized first. High quality scans are made to capture all of the detail and colours in the original.
Good colour management, in the form ICC (international color consortium), profiles of the scanner and computer screen and printer ensures that the final print matches the original as closely as possible in terms of colour and density
Once the scan is complete, you can print on-demand – order as many or as few copies as you like.
The high costs and volumes of offset litho printing are not a concern. You can reduce your printing costs by only printing what you have sold. You don’t need to keep unsold prints and you also have the choice to print on different types of paper or in different sizes.
High Quality Print
What problems can an artist expect when producing a giclee printed from original artwork? Scan quality and choosing the correct media to print on are the two most important things to consider. It is the most important thing in the entire process. The scanning industry has a saying that “junk in, junk out” which means that if your scan is poor, you will be disappointed.