峽
Symbols Nature
canyon
ㄒㄧㄚˊ xiá
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.
A deep cut between cliffs; Chinese distinguishes the gorge from the valley more sharply than English.
Before you commit
Choose with careA lone 峽 reads as strait, because of 台灣海峽, the Taiwan Strait. Write 峽谷 for a canyon on land. Note also that 谷 is valley in traditional Chinese, while 穀 is grain.
Pairs well with峽谷 for the landform, 三峽 for the Three Gorges of the Yangtze, which is what most Chinese readers picture when they think of a gorge.
At small sizes峽 is ten strokes with a mountain radical left. Fine at moderate size; the pair 峽谷 stays light.
Meaning
A gorge; also a strait between two coasts.
The single character for a narrow passage between heights, land or water.
Other characters for “canyon”
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