What is a Giclee or Gicleé?

Gicleé also seen written as Gicleés Giclee or Giclees is pronounced (zhee-CLAY). It is a French word meaning to squirt or spurt a liquid.
It may have derived from the French verb “gicler” meaning “to squirt”. In the case of gicleé reproduction limited edition prints it means a “spray of ink”

Gicleés were originally developed as a proofing system for Lithograph printing presses but quickly became a way of printing in itself. The presses could not reproduce the color quality range found in gicleés. Gicleés offer the truest reproduction accuracy of any printing techniques available today.

The process of making a gicleé begins with the original painting. The original painting is scanned or photographed and then digitized. The digitized image is corrected to represent the colors and clarity of the original artwork. This takes a computer expert in Adobe CS2 programs. The gicleé file is as important if not more than the printing technology. The more precise method for creating the original files the better results. The goal of producing a quality gicleé is to match the original exact. This guarantees that a quality gicleé is a true representation of the original painting. This is an art in itself to produce a correct image match. This digital image is then printed onto paper or canvas.