ephemeral

幻

ㄏㄨㄢˋ huàn

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

Beautiful and over quickly. Chinese carries this idea in images: morning dew, or a flower that opens for a single night.

Before you commit

Choose with care幻 says unreal more than short-lived. If you mean something lovely that ended, the images 朝露 and 曇花 say it far more precisely.

Cultural note曇花一現 is used slightly critically in Chinese, of talent or fame that flared once and came to nothing.

At small sizesFour strokes, spare and open. Excellent at small sizes and on curved skin, though it looks stark standing on its own.

Meaning

Illusory, unreal; a phantom or a mirage.

The thing that seemed solid and is not there in the morning.

Other characters for “ephemeral”

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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