The printing process
What is a giclée?
Glad you asked. A giclée is a high-quality, digitally-produced fine art print. The term was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne at Nash Editions to distinguish archival-quality prints from the utilitarian proofs of standard inkjet printers.
The image is generated from high-resolution digital scans of the original and allows for the incredibly detailed prints seen in museums and galleries. A giclée provides better color accuracy than any other type of reproduction, and has all the tonalities and hues of the original work.
Paper as good as money
Our giclées are printed on cotton paper (otherwise known as ‘rag paper’). Cotton paper is stronger and more durable than wood pulp paper, and resists fading, discoloration or deterioration, so it’s used for important documents and archival-quality artwork. Cotton paper is what they use to print money – which just goes to show what a good investment it is. (If it’s good enough for the National Treasury, it’s good enough for us.)
Our paper comes from Hahnemühle FineArt GmbH, which has been manufacturing paper since 1584. Their paper is made with pure spring water and high-grade cotton, and traditional recipes are still used to make paper for painters, illustrators, bookbinders, and of course, Curio & Co.
Pigments to last
Special artwork and special paper requires special ink. Our giclées use pigment inks, rather than the standard dye-based inks used in regular printers. Pigment inks provide better image stability and last longer and than any other method. Since the pigment doesn’t dissolve completely and soak into the paper the way that dye-based inks do, pigment inks are more water resistant and won’t bleed at the edges of an image. What’s more, because pigment molecules stack themselves on top of the paper, it’s harder for sunlight or chemicals to react with the pigment molecules – making the image highly resistant to fading.
For all of this, of course, pigment inks are more expensive than dye-based inks, but when protected from air and sunlight, these inks will last many, many years. And when something looks this good, you want to keep it around.
Planned Voyage (Viaggio Organizzato)
Roger Believe
This giclée of the 1986 Roger Believe cover of Planned Voyage (Viaggio Organizzato) is part...
Friday, May 17, 2013
by Ned Wazowski
Tagging along with Frank and His Friend
You might be a couple of minutes late to the party, but you haven’t missed any of the action.
One of my favorite things about Frank and His Friend is how open the storylines are. You often get the feeling that you’re just coming in on the middle of the action.
Artist Clarence ‘Otis’ Dooley often drew panels in such a way that the scene or the dialog hinted at what came before, but didn’t provide you with a complete picture. Like a snapshot, rather than a home movie.
Dooley didn’t always explain exactly what Frank and his Friend were up to, because those details just weren’t always important. Why, or how, a kid might have built an enormous pile of rocks was less important than how that task might have made a kid feel: enormously proud. Through these small moments of feeling, Dooley allowed us to fill in our own stories from childhood and remember the joy or exhilaration or even pride from those moments.
And I suppose, it was the feeling rather than the plot that appealed to Dooley most. After all, kids build rock piles for the same reason people climb mountains: because they’re there.
So whether or not you did all the same things as a kid that Frank and his Friend did (I’m disappointed, for example, that I never thought to use a plunger as an arrow with a bow), you can always relate to the feelings. How pleased with yourself would you have been to build an enormous pile of rocks? You’d just have to show someone.
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