Costs of making Giclée prints from your Fine Art? Benefit of Giclée printing?

There are costs associated with just about everything. That is no different when it comes to making a Giclée print of your fine art?

Click here if you don't fully understand what a Giclée print is?

Where the costs come in is mostly in the upfront process of art reproduction.

The upfront process = cost to digitally capture the artwork via scanners or by professional photography. Now this scan is not done by your typical, crappy all-in-one scanner from HP. Or the photo is not taken by the digital camera you just bought at Walmart. These scanners are big, high quality, sometimes roller scanners. And the photos are taken with what are usually 4" x 5" professional grade cameras with scanner backs (essentially a large format camera that takes a scanned picture).

And then, of course, you have the costs associated with the inkjet print process, the stretching of canvas onto the stretcher bars, framing (if necessary) and shipping of the reproduction. These costs can range depending on the printer you choose and by the size of the work being reproduced. My recommendation -- shop a few printers to price compare! But use common sense, and ask for references or testimonials also. The resulting print quality from various printers can vary as much as the price.

Now if your are gonna print thousands of copies of your original artwork it will be more economically feasible to go the route of four-color offset lithography -- in a run of the 1000s.

See... Giclée allows you to have more control on a limited print run. Usually these quantities are around 1 - 15. The brilliant part is you as the artist can have your digital scan and proof stored at a friendly neighborhood printer, and then just call them up and tell them to run 1 or 2 off and ship to here or there when needed. This way you have no inventory, no overhead and no associated storage costs.

What is a typical benefit of making prints of your fine art?

A huge benefit of reproducing via this process is that you open you fine art availability to a broader audience, not only by more pieces being available, but by shear entry-level price alone. Giclée prints are typically sold for a fraction, 1/10th, of what the original fine art would cost.