煙
Symbols Nature
smoke
ㄧㄢ yān
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.
Smoke and haze; in everyday Chinese the same character means cigarette first.
Before you commit
Choose with careIn ordinary speech 煙 means cigarette: 抽煙 to smoke, 一根煙 a cigarette. Standing alone it will read that way before it reads as mist.
Pairs well with煙雨 for misted rain and 雲煙 for what passes and leaves nothing. Taiwan also keeps tobacco separate as 菸, which the compounds above avoid entirely.
At small sizesThirteen strokes with an enclosed right side that fills in. Use it above a couple of centimetres.
Meaning
Smoke, mist, haze; also tobacco and a cigarette.
The correct character, with the tobacco reading unavoidably attached.
Other characters for “smoke”
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