lightning

電

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

Layout

Lightning: the plain character for it now means electricity first, which makes the obvious choice the wrong one.

Before you commit

Choose with care電 is the character in the words for telephone, film, computer and battery. Worn alone it looks like a utility word, not a bolt of lightning.

Japanese電 is equally the electricity character in Japanese, so the same problem follows it across.

At small sizesThirteen strokes with a rain radical above and a hooked tail below. The tail is what keeps it legible, so do not crop it.

Meaning

Lightning; and in all modern use, electricity.

Honest warning: alone it reads as electricity, not as the sky.

Other characters for “lightning”

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