儉
Symbols Virtues
thrift
ㄐㄧㄢˇ jiǎn
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.
Spending and using carefully, treated in Chinese tradition as a moral quality rather than a money habit.
Before you commit
Choose with care儉 is admiring in Chinese but has no glamour. A reader sees a careful, unshowy person, not a minimalist aesthetic.
Pairs well with勤儉, hard work with thrift, is the classic household pairing and reads as one settled idea rather than two words.
At small sizesFifteen strokes and the simplified form differs, so a Taiwan-style 儉 signals traditional script deliberately. Needs size to stay legible.
Meaning
Thrifty, sparing, plain in one's habits.
The classical virtue of thrift, still fully current.
Other characters for “thrift”
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