Encyclopedia Britannica defines print making as an art form consisting of the production of images by various techniques of multiplication.  The first appearance of print making in the American colonies was in 1670, a woodcut portrait made by a Boston artist.  The major techniques of print making consist of relief printing, where the background is cut away, leaving a raised image; intaglio printing, where the image is etched or incised into the plate; surface printing such as lithography, where the image is painted or drawn onto a stone; and stencil printing, where the image is cut out and ink is sprayed through the stencil.

Lithography was invented in Germany in 1789.  When the photographic preparation of plates was introduced, photo lithography came into existence, as did offset lithography, when an extra rubber cylinder was used. They are both now generally considered methods of offset printing. The rubber transfer cylinder runs in contact with the printing-plate cylinder, which has replaced the flat stone, and receives the inked image from it; this image is then offset onto the paper. The rubber cylinder keeps the delicate printing plate from coming in contact with the printed object. Very long printing runs, are thereby made possible, and the faithfulness of reproduction and sensitive shading, unique to lithography, are preserved.  Because of this, lithography became the printing method of choice for fine art reproduction.  The set-up costs for making the plates is rather high. However, the more prints you made the cost per print went down.  Of course, you had to print large quantities in order to make the prints affordable to sell.  If the prints didn't sell well the artist was stuck with a large inventory.  Offset printing is done with four ink colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black (cmyk).  The color gamut with this method is rather small and it is difficult to reproduce certain colors and tones that some paintings possess.

This brings us to giclée  (zhee-clay) printing.  French word meaning "sprayed ink" - This is a computer generated print that is produced by the spraying of ink onto a high quality paper or canvas.  It is capable of producing millions of colors.  This allows for a high degree of fine detail, closely matching the original.  At the end of the 1980's the Iris printing system was created as a proofing system for commercial pre-press before going to plate.  Scitex, an Israeli company, created a series of printers that could create amazingly detailed and faithful reproductions. Jack Duganne and Nash Editions in particular saw the potential to exploit this technology by printing on watercolor paper. Although these prints looked stunning, the initial materials were not stable.  Inks were only available as dyes, with a short life span. Although these printers created good results, their technology is now considered obsolete.  It did not take too long for larger companies to realize how important the potential market for high quality inkjet printing was going to be.  Epson, a division of Seiko Corporation, created its piezo head technology and quickly started coming out with printers that were easier to run and less prone to clogging compared to Iris. The results, at least for the best part of the 90s, were just a chase to reach the quality of the original inkjet printers.  When 2000 (circa) came, both Epson, Canon and HP came out with fantastic printers, greatly surpassing the resolution, color gamut and archival properties of the original Iris.  The set-up costs to make giclee prints is lower than offset but the print costs are higher. The benefits of this method of reproduction is that the artist can make one print or many, no need to inventory prints that may not sell.