Giclee is a high quality printing process in which the artist's original painting is digitally reproduced using state of the art technology and the finest inks, papers, and canvas. The Giclee printmaker and artist oversee every detail of the reproduction, resulting in a stunning display of color that highlights even the most subtle brush stroke of the original artwork. The Giclee process begins with a high resolution digital scanning-back camera that is able to digitally capture large format images. This eliminates the need for a photographic transparency scan of the original painting. The artwork has been captured directly, without any loss of image quality. The next stage is the collaboration between the artist and Giclee printmaker, who then agree upon the proper color management levels before sending the image to print. This process requires a great degree of time and effort; many tests are implemented before the levels are precise and meet the artist's and printmaker's standards.

The "Giclee" (pronounced 'zhee-clay', a French term meaning 'spray of ink') printmaking method was originally developed in 1989 with the introduction of the Iris digital printer. In this process, a fine stream of ink, more than four million droplets per second, is sprayed onto archival art paper or canvas. Each piece of paper or canvas is hand mounted onto a drum which rotates during printing. The effect is similar to an airbrush technique, but the Giclee droplets are over 35 times finer. The process of printing the Giclee can be a long one, and can take several hours to an entire day to produce one fine art print. Because no screens are used, the Giclee fine art prints have a higher resolution than lithographs, resulting in stronger contrast and richer color saturation. Testing of the inks, in combination with the fine art mediums used, has shown that these art prints last longer than those produced from traditional offset lithography.

Although there are many new printers entering the Giclee market, we have chosen the original Iris 3047G printer for our Giclee on watercolor paper and canvas. The Iris Printer produces a Giclee that rivals the original painting in its quality. Each of the Giclee prints in the limited edition series is hand signed and numbered by Greg Fetler, and each will come with a Certificate of Authenticity outlining the details of the reproduction. To ensure the integrity of the limited edition, the printmaker will destroy the digital file when the last Giclee is sold in the series.

Giclee fine art prints have been shown in exhibitions and purchased for permanent collections in museums and galleries throughout the world, including the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and The Smithsonian. The Giclee stands on its own as a true original work of art, and is a valuable investment for the fine art collector (Click on the highlighted link to return to Greg Fetler Fine Art Gallery).