Giant giclées

Giclée New England (gicleeofnewengland.com) is a Palmer, Massachusetts-based giclée print shop, frame shop, and gallery that produces “fine-art wall murals.” When the shop recently moved to a new location, it took a 35mm slide shot by the gallery’s featured artist and enlarged it to create a 40 x 60-inch fine-art wall mural. The mural was used to promote the artist’s work in interchangeable signage for an upcoming show.

To produce the wall murals, Giclée of New England used an Epson Perfection V700 photo scanner to scan the 35mm slide and up-res it to a wide-format file. It then used Photoshop to execute color correction, file building, and design. “Although this may be small when compared to building wraps, it is very large for a film photographer. It looked great,” says Nancy Bryant, president of Giclée of New England.

The company then turned to its 44-inch Canon ImageProGraf 8100 and 44-inch Epson Stylus Pro 9800 wide-format printers to direct print onto PhotoTex Adhesive Fabric using the Epson Imageprint RIP by Colorbyte and Lucia and Epson KC Ultrachrome pigmented inks. Actual printing time was 20 minutes.

“It’s exciting to find new ways to present fine art,” Bryant says. “It gives the creative community a new source of revenue. Making a living as an artist can be difficult, so any way an artist can sell their art is an asset to the creative economy.”

And not a bad side effect of the project: When other artists saw the wall mural, orders came flying in for the creation of wide-format murals of their own work.