新
Symbols Life
new life
生
ㄒㄧㄣ ㄕㄥ xīn shēng
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.
A life just begun, or a life begun again. Chinese handles the two senses with different words and no single character covers both.
Before you commit
Choose with careNo single character means new life, so 新生 is the honest answer. Note that in daily use it very often means a freshman at school - context does the work.
Japanese新生 exists in Japanese with the same reading of new birth, so this one will not read as distinctly Chinese.
At small sizesThirteen strokes across two characters. Set them stacked or well spaced; crowded side by side they read as one blur.
Meaning
New life; also a first-year student, and new growth in nature.
The natural two-character word, instantly parsed and slightly hopeful.
Other characters for “new life”
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