黃
Symbols Memory
the other side
泉
ㄏㄨㄤˊ ㄑㄩㄢˊ huáng quán
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.
Where the dead are said to go. Chinese pictures it underground, with a road leading down to it.
Before you commit
Choose with care黃泉 is bleak. Chinese uses it in phrases about never meeting again, not in phrases about reunion - it offers no comfort at all.
JapaneseJapanese reads the same characters as yomi, the land of the dead in its own mythology. A Japanese eye will take that reading first.
At small sizesTwenty-one strokes over two characters, dense through the middle. Give it real size or the interiors close up.
Meaning
The Yellow Springs; the classical Chinese underworld.
The oldest name for where the dead go, and still understood.
Other characters for “the other side”
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.
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