What Is Fine Art Printing?

Find out what fine art printing, also known as giclée, is and why you should use it in your art projects

Fine art printing, also known as giclée printing, is a printing process that allows you to obtain much better image definition in photographs, illustrations, designs, collages, and any other type of graphic representation.

A giclée or fine art print is made with an inkjet printer, on cotton or natural fiber paper (such as rice paper, or bamboo), with specially formulated inks. While printers typically compose the images mixing CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black), fine art or giclée printers use other colors like light cyan, light magenta, three types of gray, and some less common tones, such as orange or green. The exact mix depends on the type of printer.

Like inkjet printers, this printing process deposits the pigment in small drops on the paper, but patterns and shapes are drawn in a much more defined way. This results in a high-quality digitized printout that looks manually produced.

How fine art printing came about

Giclée printing was first used in the early 90s in the US by Jack Duganne at Nash Editions studio, although precursors of these types of prints were made by Graham Nash in the same studio a few years earlier. He used what is commonly known as an Iris printer (a machine for industrial-level prepress proofing, usually used in packaging and publishing projects), and printed on cotton aquarelle paper (traditionally reserved for engraving) with eight different inks.

Why print in giclée or fine art

When the first giclée prints were made, the goal was to get the best results possible. That still holds true today. When artists, photographers, illustrators, or gallery owners use this type of print, they do so that the colors are more precise.

However, there is another compelling reason to print using giclée: cotton paper is often used as the medium for the print and that means that, in good storage conditions, prints can last for 150 years or more.

In the Domestika course Introduction to the Fine Art Printing Process, photographer Martín del Pozo Ballesteros teaches you how to edit your images to print them using this technique.

English version by @angeljimenez.

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