奠
Symbols Memory
honor the dead
ㄉㄧㄢˋ diàn
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.
Giving the dead their due. Chinese has one character that appears at funerals and essentially nowhere else.
Before you commit
Choose with care奠 is unmistakably funerary. It reads as a death in the family, not as reverence in general, so it is wrong for anything but this.
At small sizesTwelve strokes, wide and symmetrical over a broad base. Stable small, though the horizontals can merge.
Cultural noteAt a traditional Chinese funeral a single large 奠 hangs behind the altar. Most readers have seen it there and in no other setting.
Meaning
To pour an offering for the dead; a funeral libation.
The single character written large above a Chinese funeral altar.
Other characters for “honor the dead”
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