work

工

ㄍㄨㄥ gōng

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

What you do for a living, or the doing of it. Chinese splits work into the craft, the act and the job.

Before you commit

Choose with care工 is very plain. Three strokes, one horizontal over another joined by a stem, and it looks like a construction mark or a component of a bigger character to some eyes.

Pairs well with工作 for a job, 手工 for handmade work, 工夫 for skill won by practice - the same word behind the martial arts term kung fu.

At small sizesThree strokes and perfectly symmetrical. This is about as small-size safe as a Chinese character gets, and it holds up on any curve.

Meaning

Work, labour, craft; a worker, and skill at a trade.

The oldest and plainest word, and the base of the whole family.

Other characters for “work”

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