新
Symbols Life
fresh start
ㄒㄧㄣ xīn
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.
Beginning again with nothing carried over. Chinese leans on the character for new, then pairs it to say what exactly is new.
Before you commit
Choose with care新 alone is an adjective. It says new, not new start, and most readers will silently supply a noun after it — pairing it is safer.
JapaneseShared with Japanese, read shin or atarashii with the same meaning, so this one will not read as distinctly Chinese.
At small sizesThirteen strokes, evenly split left and right. Scales down cleanly and keeps its shape on curved placements.
Meaning
New, fresh, newly; to make new.
The whole idea in one character, and read as positive by everyone.
Other characters for “fresh start”
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