transience

暫

ㄗㄢˋ zàn

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

Layout

Lasting only a short while. Chinese says this either as plain briefness or with the image of a life floating on water.

Before you commit

Choose with care暫 is administrative in daily use — 暫停 means paused and 暫停營業 means temporarily closed. Alone it can read like a shop sign.

Cultural note浮生 comes from 浮生若夢, this floating life is like a dream, and it brings that literary melancholy with it.

At small sizesFifteen strokes, a heavy top over a sun. It stacks vertically, so it stays legible on narrow placements.

Meaning

Brief, temporary; for a short while.

The plain character for something that will not last long.

Other characters for “transience”

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