秋
Symbols Nature
autumn
ㄑㄧㄡ qiū
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 season of harvest and of clear decline; in Chinese it leans melancholy, not cosy.
Before you commit
Choose with careIn compounds 秋 can mean a grave moment, as in 危急存亡之秋, an hour of life or death. The character is not purely seasonal.
At small sizesNine strokes, evenly split grain and fire. One of the best-behaved season characters small.
Cultural noteChinese poetry treats autumn as parting, ageing and clear-eyed sadness. English autumn nostalgia is warmer than what a Chinese reader brings to it.
Meaning
Autumn; also a critical moment or juncture.
Clean and ancient, made of grain beside fire, and instantly read.
Other characters for “autumn”
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