foundation

基

ㄐㄧ jī

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

Layout

What everything else is built on. Chinese has one character for the base of a building and one for the stone under a pillar.

Before you commit

Choose with care基 seldom stands alone in modern Chinese. A reader recognises it instantly but will feel it is waiting for a second character, the way the prefix infra- looks in English.

Pairs well with基礎 for foundations, 根基 for deep roots, 基石 for a cornerstone. 根本 says fundamental in the sense of what really matters.

At small sizesEleven strokes, wide top over an earth radical at the base. It sits solidly and holds up reasonably well small.

Meaning

Base, foundation, groundwork; the basis of something.

The character in foundation, fundamental and basic alike.

Other characters for “foundation”

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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