時
Symbols Life
time
ㄕˊ shí
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.
Time as it passes and is spent. Chinese has one character for clock time and separate words for time as something a life is made of.
Before you commit
Choose with care時 alone reads as hour, season or when — a unit rather than the idea of time. For time as something precious, 光陰 says it far better.
Cultural note一寸光陰一寸金, an inch of time is an inch of gold, is the proverb every child learns. That is why 光陰 sounds valuable rather than merely long.
At small sizesTen strokes, sun radical left. Compact and stable, and it handles curves well if the right side gets a little air.
Meaning
Time, hour, season; when.
The base character in every word about time, and readable on its own.
Other characters for “time”
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