Advantages of Giclee Prints

If you paint with the intention of selling your work you need to make some up-front decisions. Are you going to sell only originals or are you going to offer limited edition images for sale? Here is a very good reason to offer limited edition prints. When a person purchases one of your original paintings they are not only purchasing the image because they like it, but with the idea it may increase in value. The only way it will do this is if you and your work become well known. If you only sell originals this will be hard to do. Very few people will ever see your work. Now comes the advantage of Giclee reproductions. When you sell an original painting you need to reserve the right to produce limited edition prints. When you produce and sell limited edition prints your work becomes more in demand and your value as an artist increases.

As your value increased so does your work. As your work increases in value so does the original prints that were sold to your customers. Everyone wins.  

Before the advent of Giclee Prints it was very expensive to reproduce your artwork. First you had to have a good set of color separations made. These separations were normally sized to the size of the image you thought would be your best seller. Then the separations were burned onto a metal plate and printed by an offset press. The offset press was either a multi color press or a one color press. Either way the setup alone was expensive and editions of 500 to a 1000 prints had to be printed to make it economical. If you were selling a large number of prints this was not a problem, but if you only sold 5 prints you now had a lot of costly inventory.

The Giclee Print process offers you a very practical cost advantage. Since your original art has been saved as a digital file you can order prints as they are needed and in the sizes you need. This allows you to publish your artwork without a large up-front expenditure. You can now test market your art before committing to large production runs.
  
The Giclee technology provides incredible detail and color quality. The resolution (DPI or dots per inch) is actually higher than traditional lithography (1440 dpi inkjet vs. 133 litho.). This allows us to adjust color, contrast, brightness, and color saturation until the final reproduction matches the artist's original. One of the really great things about Giclee prints is that you can print on any material that you can send through the printer. We have printed on Kraft paper, 140lb. watercolor paper, vinyl, silk, and canvas. If it will take ink, and go through the printer, we can print on it.

NEWS: We are now using a new Canon Wide Format 12 color archival inkjet printer. Color matching your original just took a giant step forward.

Contact me today to get started. (717-576-8884)