Giclee: Printing on Watercolor Paper

Watercolor printing offers watercolorists and photographers the opportunity to create giclee prints on heavy weight medium or smooth textured papers such as the Hahnemuhle William Turner or Photo rag. Hahnemuhle is a very well known and respected german manufacturer of cotton rag papers.

Smooth and textured watercolor papers

While watercolorists may find the William Turner an ideal substrate to match their originals, the Photo rag is a cotton rag base that matches smooth cold press papers. Ideal candidates are photographers and artists requiring no texture but still the quality that only a pure cotton paper carries. Expect a great print longevity from any of these substrates; accelerated aging results point to over 100 years with K3 inks. Use care when handling before framing. Although K3 inks are the most scratch resistant giclee pigments on the market, we use matte black, which renders very high Dmax but is slightly more susceptible to scuffing. The prints can be framed with archival corners or mounted with a heat sensitive tissue. We do not recommend a temperature over 180 F.

Watercolor printing specifications

When preparing files for watercolor, please use a minimum resolution of 180 PPI for William Turner (textured paper) and 200 PPI for Photo rag. No higher PPI is needed. If submitting black and white images, convert you RGB files to grayscale. If the images are black and white with some tone (i.e. sepia), keep the file in RGB. As always, please do a gamut check to make sure colors are not out of range. Upon file receipt, we will review colors and detail to spot any issues before printing. Hahnemuhle papers have wide gamuts, which allows for brilliant prints with deep blacks.

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