Giclée printing is similar in principle to that utilised by home and office ink jet printers but differs in quality, scale, colour accuracy and life expectancy. Where a normal ink-jet printer will print A4 pages using four coloured inks and give acceptable business presentation slides or digital photographs, the printers used for giclée printing will typically print at least A2 size using a set of seven or eight inks that are formulated to be light fast for a hundred years or more. They can also print onto heavy smooth or rough art papers or even specially coated canvas.
Some artists use this technique to reproduce copies of a particular piece of hand drawn art, which is scanned, colour corrected and then printed in a limited edition. Joe creates his images directly on the computer using a combination of programs that include Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop plus a high degree of custom programming.
Sometimes incredibly simple, sometimes extremely complex, the images are powerful and evocative with their own unique characteristics that owe little to traditional printmaking ideals or hackneyed 'computer graphics'. The prints are made on heavyweight smooth art paper in signed limited editions of twenty.
