What is a giclée print? How inkjet art prints are made

A giclée print is an inkjet print made as a piece of art. The process behind the French name is the same one many home printers use: tiny drops of ink are sprayed onto paper and build the picture dot by dot. This page explains where the word came from, how the printer, the ink and the paper work, and what to ask before you order or make a print. The main guide to art prints and paper covers the rest of the printing process, from pixels to storage.

Where the word giclée comes from

The Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum and research centre in Louisiana, gives the clearest short history. Giclée is a French word that means a splash or a spurt. The American printmaker Jack Duganne first used it in 1991. At the time it described images made on the IRIS, a four colour inkjet printer that Iris Graphics had introduced in 1985. Later the word spread beyond that one brand, and today the museum treats it as a name for inkjet or pigment printing in general.

The Image Permanence Institute at Rochester Institute of Technology studies how prints and photographs age. Its guide to digital prints lists giclée in its glossary as "a term often used for marketing fine-art or fine-art reproduction inkjet prints." For museum labels, the Institute recommends the plain word inkjet and advises against names such as giclée or archival pigment. So if you see giclée on a print, read it as inkjet print, and then ask which ink and which paper were used. Those two choices matter more than the name.

A short history of inkjet printing

Inkjet printing began long before computers. The Image Permanence Institute dates the first device that printed with drops of ink from a nozzle to 1867, when Lord Kelvin built one to record telegraph messages. More than a hundred years passed before inkjet printers were adapted for computers.

The Institute gives this timeline:

The University of Illinois Library's preservation guide adds that the technology behind inkjet was developed in the 1950s but only became a commercial product in the mid 1980s. It says colour inkjet quality improved in the 1990s, and home users adopted it quickly after that. The Iris printer that gave giclée its name came between these steps, in 1985.

How an inkjet printer puts ink on paper

The name inkjet describes the whole process: ink is jetted from a nozzle, crosses a small gap of air and lands on the paper. The Image Permanence Institute points out that the print head never touches the paper surface. The drops land as a pattern of dots, and under a magnifier inkjet dots look round and separate.

There are two families of inkjet printer.

Continuous inkjet

A continuous printer sends out a steady stream of charged ink drops. The printer bends the unwanted drops into a recycling channel and lets the others reach the paper. In a continuous printer such as the Iris, the paper was wrapped around a metal drum that turned under the print head, so the paper had to be flexible enough to bend around it. The Image Permanence Institute says continuous printers were the first to be used for high end art prints, although they were first built to make proofs for commercial print shops. Today the Institute says continuous inkjet is used only in large inkjet presses.

Drop on demand

A drop on demand printer releases a drop only where the image needs one. There are two ways to push the drop out. In a thermal printer, a tiny heater inside the print head briefly heats some ink until it forms a bubble, and the bubble forces a drop out of the nozzle. In a piezo printer, a thin ceramic plate bends when it receives an electric signal and presses a drop out. The Institute says all desktop inkjet printers and most wide format printers use drop on demand.

A large art printer and a home photo printer use the same basic idea. They differ in the ink set, the paper and the width of the sheet they can take.

Pigment ink and dye ink

Inkjet ink has two parts. The vehicle is the liquid that carries the colour. The colorant is the colour itself. The Image Permanence Institute says most inkjet prints in museum collections were made with water based inks.

The colorant is either a dye or a pigment:

• Dye dissolves fully in the ink liquid, so no solid pieces remain.
• Pigment is made of tiny solid particles that stay separate in the liquid.

Some printers use all dyes, some use all pigments, and some mix them, with pigment black and dye colours. The Institute says pigment colours have tended to resist moisture, air pollution and light better, while dyes have tended to last better when a print is handled. The Historic New Orleans Collection says that inkjet prints made with pigment inks are archivally stable and resist light and water. The University of Illinois guide says pigment prints on a good paper may last more than 100 years before any fading. It also warns that pigment ink scuffs more easily, above all in dark areas where a lot of ink sits on the surface.

Dye inks cost less. The University of Illinois guide says this is why dye inks are more common in home and office printers. The same guide says dye inks spread and run if even a single drop of water touches the print.

Basic inkjet printers use four inks: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The Image Permanence Institute says high end printers add lighter versions such as light cyan, light magenta and greys, and sometimes extra colours such as orange, red, green, blue or violet. More inks let the printer reach more colours and make smoother changes from light to dark.

The page on archival paper and inks explains in more detail what makes ink and paper last, and the page on lightfastness and fading explains how fading is tested.

The paper under a giclée print

Plain office paper soaks ink into its fibres, so colours look dull and lines look fuzzy. Paper makers solved this with a special top coating that holds the ink near the surface. The Image Permanence Institute calls this coating an image receiver layer.

The Institute says these coatings were first added to art papers such as watercolour paper. The coating was made of mineral particles held in a starch or plastic binder, and the ink soaked into the spaces between the particles. For this reason it is called a porous coating. Early particles were large, so these papers were always matte or kept the texture of the paper underneath.

The Historic New Orleans Collection lists several supports used for giclée prints:

• cotton rag "watercolour" paper, with a textured surface and a softer image,
• baryta paper, which gives rich black tones,
• canvas,
• vinyl.

The University of Illinois guide adds that porous paper without a plastic layer is what people usually call fine art paper, and that it is used for giclée prints. It also says that not every art inkjet print is made on porous paper. The page on matte and glossy paper compares the coated paper types in more detail.

How to read a print description

The Image Permanence Institute suggests a four part way to describe any inkjet print: the colorant, the process, the coating and the paper. Its own example is "pigment inkjet on porous-coated baryta paper." That one line tells you:

1. Pigment: the colours are solid particles, which tend to resist light and water.
2. Inkjet: the process that sprayed the ink.
3. Porous coated: the top layer that took in the ink.
4. Baryta paper: the sheet underneath, made to look like a traditional darkroom print.

When a seller writes only "giclée", you can ask for the other three parts. If the answer is "dye inkjet on plain paper", you know the print needs more care than a pigment print on coated paper.

Is a giclée print a photograph or a print?

The Image Permanence Institute answers this directly. A traditional photograph is made on paper that reacts to light. Inkjet paper does not react to light, so an inkjet print is technically not a photographic process, even when the picture began as a camera file. The Institute prefers the word print. It also recommends naming the process, such as inkjet, when describing the sheet, because only the file that made it was digital.

This matters for care. The Institute says ISO 18902, the international standard for photo storage and framing materials, is not fully suited to inkjet prints, because some adhesives can yellow them and some surfaces scuff them. Inkjet prints have their own weak points, such as scuffing on pigment prints and water damage on dye prints. The page on storing unframed prints gives care steps written for inkjet prints.

What this means for a royal pet portrait

Purrealism offers each portrait in two editions: a digital download and an art print. The art print comes in four sizes, 8 × 10, 12 × 16, 18 × 24 and 24 × 36 inches, on matte or glossy paper. You choose the edition, the size and the finish in the portrait studio.

If you plan to print a digital download yourself, the questions on this page become yours to answer. Ask the print shop, or check your own printer, for the ink type and the paper. Pigment ink on a coated art paper is the combination that the sources above describe as resistant to light and water. The page on printing a digital download lists the steps at home and at a print shop.

Fine detail is where the paper matters. A Mughal Emperor portrait, such as the grey cat in a jewelled crown and pearls in the gallery, has fine lines in the jewels and the pearls. A coated paper keeps those lines sharp, while plain paper would let the ink spread into the fibres and blur them.