原
Symbols Beauty
original
ㄩㄢˊ yuán
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.
First, or made new rather than copied. Chinese uses one character for the source sense and another for the creative one.
Before you commit
Choose with care原 means original in the sense of unaltered - the original version, the raw material. It says nothing about being inventive; that needs 原創.
JapaneseJapanese uses 原 the same way, mostly in compounds and in surnames such as Hara, so a standing 原 gives no signal of language.
At small sizesTen strokes under a cliff radical, well spaced. Reliable at small sizes and on curved placements.
Meaning
Original, primary, source; raw and unprocessed.
Original as where a thing came from - 原本 originally, 原料 raw material.
Other characters for “original”
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