Ian Tilton’s prints are produced on Fuji Rough Art Paper, A cotton-based heavy weight paper ideal for the production of fine art images. The rough top structure gives a special finishing to the image. The prints are produced via a process known as ‘Giclee’.

Introduction

“Giclee” (pronounced “Jee Clay”, from the French for ‘little squirt’!).

A “giclee” print is a piece of printed artwork or photograph produced by using a high quality inkjet printer. The first printer in this class was an Iris, and Iris printers still claim to lead the field. Other print machine makers include Epson, Mimaki, Mutoh, Hewlett Packard and Roland. The inks used must be specially formulated and compatible with the extreme fineness of the printer head that spurts jets of ink in minute droplets at a resolution of 1440dpi or more. Epson, Iris and Lyson supply many of the ink-sets that have been tested. The paper or canvas that is used is specially prepared to accept this type of printing mechanism and ink-set. Hahnemuhle, St Cuthberts, Epson and Lyson produce tested papers and canvas.

Light fastness

Early inkjet prints in the mid 1990’s were disappointingly fugitive with noticeable fading occurring quite quickly. Dramatic improvements have been made in the inks used and the paper or canvas substrate. It was found that it is crucial that the combination of machine, ink-set and substrate is compatible and tested as a whole. Recent tests show that the resulting print can be lightfast to very high levels with a minimum of six on the Blue Wool test, or 25 years by Wilhelm Institute tests. The latest test results show life expectancy rates of 100 to 200 years for giclee prints. When printed on good quality heavyweight art paper the print should possess archival standards of permanence comparable or better than other collectable artwork.

Quality

The visual quality of the print result is extremely high with seeming continuous tone prints without dots, lines or barring. The colour saturation and definition is stunning.

Benefits and disadvantages

One advantage that Giclee printing offers to the artist and publisher is that the edition can be printed on demand. Giclee images are recorded as a massively high-resolution file and can be produced on a giclee printer singly, or more, whenever required. The prints will be exactly the same at the start and end of a print run, even if the run is interrupted and printed on different occasions. This means that the high cost and risk of producing a complete print edition all at once is avoided.

A second advantage to the artist and publisher is the control available by manipulation of the file. Using special software it is possible to tweak and alter the original image to improve the size, colour, tone and other qualities of the image.

There is often more work involved in producing the first run than in producing handprints in the darkroom, with many test prints and alterations. The costs per giclee print are high because the paper, ink machinery and specialist time involved are expensive. The machines are very slow often taking an hour to print one A0 print sheet. The machines alone can cost £50,000.00.