What is a Giclee?

Giclee (zhee-clay) is a French term, in this case meaning "spray of ink", using an Iris Ink Jet printer on watercolor paper or canvas producing vibrant replicas of original paintings.   They have the look and feel of the original art.  The depth of color and the clarity achieved in the purity of color make the reproductions indeed remarkable.   This allows everyone to enjoy truly museum quality art.

The Iris digital ink jet printers use a continuous tone technology in which infinitely small pixels of color are capable of rendering an amazingly smooth and consistent image.  The substrate to be printed on is affixed to a drum and as the drum rotates at a high speed, individual droplets of colors are sprayed on to the surface at a rate of 4-5 million droplets per second.  Once completed, a 34" x 46" image is comprised of almost 20 billion droplets of ink, each one measuring no more than 15 microns in diameter.  In this process, the printers use the most archival water-based organic inks available in the world.  They then complete the print by applying UV light retardant and light stabilizer post coatings.  The results are museum quality prints.