宇
Symbols Nature
universe
宙
ㄩˇ ㄓㄡˋ yǔ zhòu
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.
All of space and time together, which classical Chinese defines as exactly those two things.
Before you commit
Choose with care宇宙 must stay as a pair. Split it and 宇 reads as bearing and 宙 reads as nothing much at all.
JapaneseThe same pair is standard in Japanese as uchuu, meaning space, and it is very visible there in science fiction. Expect that reading too.
At small sizesTwo characters of similar build, both under a roof radical. They pair neatly and hold up at moderate sizes.
Meaning
The universe; all space and all time.
The classical definition pairs space in the first character with time in the second.
Other characters for “universe”
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