Giclée or Silkscreen? How Jack Vettriano Limited Edition Prints Are Made
Read the details of any Jack Vettriano limited edition and you will meet a handful of technical terms: silkscreen, giclée, Hahnemühle, Museum Etching, Velin Arches. They are not just jargon. The way a print was made tells you when it was published, how it will look on your wall and, often, how rare it is. Here is a plain-English guide.
Silkscreen prints
A silkscreen (also called a screenprint or serigraph) is made by pushing ink through a fine mesh screen onto paper. Each colour needs its own screen, and the colours are printed one at a time, carefully lined up on top of each other. A complex image can need dozens of screens.
Because the ink sits in layers on the surface of the paper, silkscreens have a richness and density of colour that is hard to match, with deep, velvety blacks, which suits Vettriano's night scenes perfectly.
Many of Vettriano's signed editions from around 2000 to 2003 were silkscreens, including An Imperfect Past, Cocktails & Broken Hearts and Valentine Rose. They were typically printed on heavy 400gsm Velin Arches paper and issued in editions of around 275. These editions sold out long ago and were never reprinted, which is why collectors prize them.
Giclée prints
A giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is made with a high-resolution, wide-format inkjet printer using archival pigment inks. The process captures very fine detail and subtle gradations of tone, and with good inks and paper it is designed to last for generations without fading.
From the mid-2000s onwards, most new Vettriano limited editions were giclées. Typical examples include Private Dancer (2006), Days of Wine and Roses (2010), The Very Thought of You (2015) and Evening of Ritual (2022). Edition sizes vary widely, from 100 up to around 495.
A giclée is not "just an inkjet print". Fine art giclées are produced under controlled conditions, colour-proofed against the original painting, and, in the case of signed limited editions, approved and signed by the artist.
The papers
The paper names on a listing tell you about the quality and feel of the print:
Hahnemühle mould-made paper (typically 300 to 350gsm): a German fine art paper with a soft, textured surface, used for editions such as Private Dancer and Mad Dogs.
Museum Etching (300 to 350gsm): a heavy, textured, archival paper made for fine art reproduction, used for many later editions.
Velin Arches Blanc (400gsm): a traditional French printmaking paper, heavy and slightly textured, used for many silkscreens.
The gsm figure is the paper's weight in grams per square metre. Anything over 300gsm is a substantial, card-like sheet.
Premium and open editions
Two other formats are worth knowing about:
Premium editions are small runs, often the same size as the original painting, that are hand-finished and framed like an original. The Dancer For Money premium edition, for example, is limited to 50 prints, coated with three layers of lacquer and supplied board-mounted without glass.
Open editions, such as the Summer Days Triptych, are not numbered or limited, which makes them much more affordable.
Which should you choose?
There is no right answer: both methods produce beautiful, long-lasting prints. As a rule of thumb:
Choose a silkscreen if you want depth of colour and a rarer, older edition with collector appeal.
Choose a giclée if you want fine detail, a wider choice of images and, often, a lower price.
Look closely at edition size and whether the print is an Artist's Proof, which matter as much as the method. Our guide to limited editions, open editions and Artist's Proofs explains why.
Whatever you choose, frame it properly and keep it out of direct sunlight. Our guides to framing and caring for your print cover the essentials.
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