文
Symbols Mind
literature
學
ㄨㄣˊ ㄒㄩㄝˊ wén xué
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.
Writing valued as art. Chinese says it in two characters; the single 文 is far broader and means culture as much as literature.
Before you commit
Choose with care文 alone is not literature. It will be read as culture or as writing in general, which is probably more than you meant to say.
Pairs well with文人 for a person of letters, 文章 for a piece of prose. Both are more concrete than 文 standing on its own.
At small sizes文學 is four strokes beside sixteen - a very uneven pair. 學 darkens first, so size the whole thing for that character.
Meaning
Literature; imaginative writing as a field of study.
The exact modern term, with no competing reading.
Other characters for “literature”
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