新
Symbols Fortune
new year
年
ㄒㄧㄣ ㄋㄧㄢˊ xīn nián
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.
The turn of the year. Chinese has two of them - the Gregorian first of January and the lunar new year - and different words for each.
Before you commit
Choose with care新年 is a greeting card word. It reads pleasantly but generically, roughly as Happy New Year does in English once the card is closed.
Cultural noteIn Taiwan and mainland China 元旦 means only the first of January. The lunar new year is 春節 or simply 過年, and the two are not interchangeable.
At small sizesThirteen strokes beside six. 年 is clean and stable; 新 is the busier half and sets the size you need.
Meaning
New year; the new year in general, either calendar.
The neutral term, and what appears in new year greetings.
Other characters for “new year”
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