蟬
Symbols Animals
cicada
ㄔㄢˊ chán
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.
The cicada: the loud insect of high summer, and in Chinese thought an emblem of rebirth and of austere, pure living.
Before you commit
Choose with careCicadas here mean transformation and detachment from the world, not summer nostalgia. Jade cicadas were placed in the mouths of the dead for rebirth.
JapaneseRead semi in Japanese, where the cicada stands for summer and for how short life is.
At small sizesEighteen strokes and heavy on the right. Give it space or the right half fills in.
Meaning
Cicada.
One character, and the whole cluster of meanings comes with it.
Other characters for “cicada”
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.
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