A Little Giclée History

Welcome to Pagosa Fine Arts and Design, a local and global gallery and internet service for fine art and fine art prints, as well as for other related products and services. We produce fine art prints, or giclées, that are of the finest quality at competitive prices, as well as other related state-of-the-art services to enhance your ability to market and sell your work competitively. Read on!

New to Giclée?

For those new to the world of giclée, or even for those who have purchased giclée prints before, we'd like to take a few lines to bring you up to date. Giclée printing has developed into a unique, finely-tuned process that is only an afterthought with most traditional printing companies. After all, they make their money with their presses. Giclée has become the method of choice for fine art reproduction of museums and fine art galleries worldwide. Our experience and knowledge allow us to include unique services which are essential to beautiful art prints that traditional printing companies do not offer.

Traditionally, if an artist needed a limited edition run of any of his/her pieces of art, they would have had to use lithography or traditional printing methods. For the average artist, these methods have several drawbacks:

To begin with, these processes are quite costly, virtually forcing the artist to order a higher number of prints just to keep the run or per-print cost effective. Keeping in mind that the fine art collector who invests in limited edition prints wants exactly that - small, limited edition runs on the art in which they are investing. For them, and the artist, traditional printing methods are no longer feasible from a marketing standpoint. Not to mention virtually hundreds of extra prints that the artist has paid for and that remain in storage, unsold.

Furthermore, traditional 4-color printing and lithography not only limit the color quality of such reproductions, but also paper and medium choices, ink types and print quality. And don't forget the inability to do very small quantities of prints economically. On the other hand, giclée printing offers the artist at least a six color print - in many instances now 8 to 12 colors - along with an affordable minimum print run of ONE if so desired! Giclée prints virtually eliminate expensive pre-press charges, costly press set up charges, and large print runs. PFAD's Epson Stylus 9800 Pro printer uses 8 inks, and the incredible new K3 Ink Technology, for a fine "scattered" dot method of laying down ink, eliminiating traditional print issues such as moirés, rosette patterning and dot gain. It has become an incredibly affordable way to start a high-quality limited edition run for the artist - and an affordable limited printed collection for the buyer!

Finally, but not least important, is the time issue. In the past, artists were required to have their artwork photographed professionally, and then have a transparency or slide made to submit to the printer for scanning, color separating, color correction, proofing and finally to make plates for printing. Once on press, the artist needed to make press approvals for color before the entire run was done. If the service bureau and/or printer wasn't local to the artist, the whole process was reliant on mail or delivery services. Obviously, time was an important issue in the process.

Today, the artist can either photograph his/her own artwork with a digital camera, or better yet, have a transparency or digital capture made professionally by any number of advanced new methods. Of course PFAD recommends the latter, and we will be happy to handle your scanning for you if you so wish. We use only the finest photographers with decades of experience in the field. And if you choose, we can also digitally enhance and/or correct color imbalances or blemishes that may have been present on your transparency or digital file. Whether emailed to us or done here, an 8" x 10" proof of your image will be generated using your paper or medium of choice. We will send you a proof for approval, and once returned to us, your prints are made, keeping costs low whether the print number is 1 or 101 or 1001.

We also accept high-resolution files from digital artists, and offer the same services for these files as we do for scanned images.

And for your marketing benefit, we encourage all of our artists to no only allow us to showcase your art on our On-line Gallery, but also to link your website with ours. This will allow both the client and PFAD to offer website visitors greater access to not only additional works by our clients, but to be able to order prints online automatically. What an incredible marketing opportunity. For more details on how to take advantage of this unique opportunity, please contact our webmaster at: webmaster@pagosafinearts.com

To start your order and view our pricing, access our online order form, or email us at: mygiclee@pagosafinearts.com if you need more information.