朱
Symbols Animals
vermilion bird
雀
ㄓㄨ ㄑㄩㄝˋ zhū què
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.
The red bird of the south and of summer, one of the four celestial guardians; related to the phoenix but not the same creature.
Before you commit
Choose with careThe vermilion bird is not the fenghuang and not the ashes-and-rebirth phoenix of Western myth. If that is the image you want, 鳳 or 鳳凰 is the honest choice.
JapaneseRead suzaku, and very familiar in Japan from Kyoto place names and from games.
At small sizes朱 is six strokes and 雀 eleven, a balanced pair that stays readable.
Meaning
Vermilion Bird: southern guardian among the four celestial animals.
The standard name; 朱 is a specific cinnabar red, not red in general.
Other characters for “vermilion bird”
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