雪
Symbols Nature
cedar
松
ㄒㄩㄝˇ ㄙㄨㄥ xuě sōng
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.
True cedar has no single Chinese character; the words available all name neighbouring trees.
Before you commit
Choose with careThere is no single character meaning cedar. Anything short you choose will name a fir, a cypress or a juniper instead, so pick which neighbour you can live with.
Japanese杉 and 檜 are ordinary Japanese tree names, sugi and hinoki. Either will read as Japanese to a Japanese speaker.
At small sizes杉 is seven strokes and prints beautifully small. 雪松 and 檜 are both considerably heavier.
Meaning
Cedar, botanically; literally snow pine.
The accurate modern term for Cedrus, though it is a technical name rather than a poetic one.
Other characters for “cedar”
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