藝
Symbols Beauty
art
ㄧˋ yì
Two versions of the same picture, and both are free with no account and no watermark. The first has no background at all, which is the one to send your artist — but a phone or computer photo viewer set to dark will show black strokes on dark grey and it can look like nothing downloaded. If that happens, use the second one: identical characters on a plain white background. Either way you get the characters on their own — the square and the faint guide lines you see above are not in the file. Each character is 1000px, so a two-character download is 2000×1000, and the script and layout are the ones you picked.
Script
Characters
Same in both
Layout
Rubbing mode: white on black, as a stone rubbing. The download is unaffected.
Skilled making, from calligraphy to sculpture. The Chinese character starts from skill rather than from self-expression.
Before you commit
Choose with care藝 means skill before it means art. Alone it reads as a cultivated ability, and 藝人 is an entertainer rather than an artist.
JapaneseJapanese writes 芸, which looks quite different. The traditional 藝 reads as Chinese or as deliberately classical.
At small sizesEighteen strokes under a grass radical, very dense through the middle. One of the worst characters here for small work.
Meaning
Art; skill, craft, a cultivated ability.
Behind both fine art and any practised skill - the six arts of the classical curriculum.
Other characters for “art”
What to do next
Pick the script and layout you want above, download the PNG, and send that file to your artist. Ask them to work from the file rather than redrawing the character freehand — that is where strokes go missing.
Related concepts