侘
Symbols Beauty
wabi-sabi
寂
ㄔㄚˋ ㄐㄧˊ chà jí · mainland reads chà jì
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 Japanese taste for what is weathered, plain and incomplete. It is a Japanese idea, and Chinese has no native word for it.
Before you commit
Choose with careThis is not a Chinese phrase. 侘 is a rare character in Chinese, and the pair only reads as wabi-sabi to someone who already knows the Japanese term.
JapaneseIn Japan the word is usually written in kana or simply understood, so even there the bare kanji pair looks a little self-conscious.
At small sizesNineteen strokes over two characters, with a roof radical over a busy base in the second. Keep the sizing generous.
Meaning
Wabi-sabi; beauty in what is worn, plain and impermanent.
The Japanese term written in kanji - Chinese readers know it as a loan.
Other characters for “wabi-sabi”
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.
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