工
Symbols Beauty
craftsmanship
藝
ㄍㄨㄥ ㄧˋ gōng 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.
Skill of the hand, and the care that shows in a made thing. Chinese separates the trade, the technique and the maker.
Before you commit
Choose with care工藝 is a category word - it labels a field, the way workmanship does on a museum caption. For the devotion behind the work, 匠心 says it better.
Pairs well with手藝 for hand skill, 匠心 for the care a maker puts in. Both read instantly to any Chinese reader.
At small sizesTwenty-one strokes, nearly all of them in 藝. The grass radical and the stacked middle clog quickly at small scale.
Meaning
Craft, workmanship, the technique of making.
The standard word for craft as a discipline, from ceramics to industrial process.
Other characters for “craftsmanship”
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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