空
Symbols Emotions
emptiness
ㄎㄨㄥ kōng
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.
Empty in the Buddhist sense — nothing fixed at the centre — as much as merely hollow.
Before you commit
Choose with care空 is the everyday word for vacant and for sky. Without context many readers see empty seat before they see the void.
At small sizes8 strokes, wide and open, with a roof radical that holds its shape. Reliable small and on curves.
Cultural note空 is the key term of the Heart Sutra, so it reads as Buddhist to most Chinese readers. Make sure that is an association you want.
Meaning
Empty, vacant; sky; emptiness in Buddhist thought.
One character holding both the plain and the philosophical meaning.
Other characters for “emptiness”
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