Giclees
They are often incorrectly referred to as posters or paintings. They are neither.
Tony Max giclées are high-resolution, archival art prints, printed slowly and laboouriously – one at a time – using fade-resistant inks on acid-free paper.
Each print is trimmed by hand, using a ruler and art knife, and inspected by the artist for quality assurance.
Flawed prints that can be fixed are put aside and embellished by the artist, who paints on the giclées to match the color of the print and cover the flaw. (This type of hand-embellished print is known as a remarqué.)
Flawed prints that cannot be fixed (about 10 percent of all prints printed) are cut into pieces with scissors and recycled, ensuring consistent, high quality throughout the edition.
The artist signs and numbers the limited editions prints and fills out the certificate of authenticity that accompanies each print.
Giclée printing is not mass production. There is a significant element of hand-crafting and individual attention involved for each art print, and Tony Max is involved in every stage of production.
The artist meticulously records in his books the history of each print: first documenting the printing of each print, and after the print has been sold, the selling date, and the name of the buyer are also recorded, so each print has its history recorded.
Giclees are archival and last longer than than offset lithographs. They last even longer under u.v. glass).
Giclée printing allaws for more vibrant colours and a broader colour gamut than mass production offset lithography because most of the giclée printers use seven, eight or nine ink colours instead of the four colours normally used in offsel lithography, and the inks are long-lasting pigmented inks.
They are expensive to print because of the cost of printing and materials used, and the amount of care requiired to hand-craft these archival prints one at a time.
The archival quality, the hand-crafting, the limiting of edition sizes of the limited edition prints and the increasing reputation of the artist all serve to enhance the value of the prints for art collectors for generations.
They are usually transferred from the publisher to the artist.
With traditional forms of printmaking such as stone lithography and etching, the artist's proofs constituted a small number of defective prints, which were prized because they the defects made them different in a unique way from the unblemished prints.
Because artist's proofs traditionally were unique because of defects, they came to be valued more that the prints in the regular edition. They are generally valued about 20 percent higher than the prints in the regular edition, even though, in this modern time, people expect all prints to be free of defects.
They are usually rarer than artist's proofs.
For the Tony Max's editions that include publisher's proofs, there are only five prints of each images.