復
Symbols Life
restoration
ㄈㄨˋ fù
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.
Bringing something back to what it was - health, a building, a family fortune. Chinese centres this on one returning character.
Before you commit
Choose with care復 alone is a bound character in modern Chinese - readers understand it but expect a second character after it. Consider whether looking incomplete matters to you.
At small sizesTwelve strokes, tall and narrow with a stepping radical. Suits a vertical placement; it compresses poorly sideways.
Cultural note復興 appears in many street and institution names in Taiwan, so it reads as familiar and slightly civic rather than personal.
Meaning
To restore, recover, return, resume.
The character at the heart of every Chinese word for restoring and recovering.
Other characters for “restoration”
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