真
Symbols Mind
truth of reason
ㄓㄣ zhēn
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.
What is actually so, settled by argument rather than felt. Chinese separates the genuine from the established truth.
Before you commit
Choose with care真 means genuine as much as true. Alone it reads as real or authentic, closer to not fake than to correct.
JapaneseShared with Japanese, read shin or ma, and very common in names. Expect a Japanese reader to take it as a name element.
At small sizesTen strokes with several stacked horizontals. Those lines merge if the ink spreads, so avoid the smallest sizes.
Meaning
True, real, genuine; not false and not an imitation.
The everyday word for true, used of gold, of feelings and of statements alike.
Other characters for “truth of reason”
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