In working on my yet-unnamed-animal-portrait project, I have been trying to research good ways to do prints.
I recently stumbled upon Giclee Prints as a term. I was in Chicago with my friend Dana Larson, (who is also an illustrator, www.zelaphas.com) and we found some absolutely gorgeous prints by Anastasia Mak. The prints were very nicely color matched to the nearby paintings, and I noticed that they were giclee prints on canvas.
I started looking into the process, trying to figure out just what makes a giclee print, since I have a rather nice Canon Pixma Pro 9000 printer. There were a lot of different definitions, but since Wikipedia seems to be the be all and end all of defining things, here's Wikipedia's definition of giclee prints:
"... the name originally applied to fine art prints created on IRIS printers in a process invented in the late 1980s but has since come to mean any inkjet print. It is often used by artists, galleries, and print shops to denote high quality printing but since it is an unregulated word it has no associated warranty of quality."
All right, so if that's it, the majestic Pixma Pro should do the trick.
I poked around the internet a bit more, and the points that stuck out were a little less open.
The majority or sources that I found agreed that the prints should be: made by a printer that has 8 or 12 colors, that the print is made from a high resolution scan or image, that it should be printed on a high quality paper or other substrate. The one thing that waffled was if it MUST be a pigment ink or a dye-based ink. And this is where the Pixma sadly does not qualify. But since the Chromalife 100 Dye inks that my printer uses are also rated for about the same as pigment ink... I'm happy to experiment with new paper types and see what happens.
SO! In conclusion, get ready for prints!
In the meantime, my Society6 account handles my printing, so I wholeheartedly encourage you to buy them there!
