陽
Symbols Spirit
yang
ㄧㄤˊ yáng
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 bright, active, outward half of the yin-yang pair - sun rather than shade. On its own the character mostly just means sunny.
Before you commit
Choose with care陽 alone reads as sunny, or as the sunlit side of a hill. It is also very common in place and personal names - 洛陽, 陽明山 - so it can land as a name before it lands as philosophy.
JapaneseRead yo or hi in Japanese and extremely common in given names there, so the glyph will not read as specifically Chinese.
At small sizesTwelve strokes with the mound radical on the left. It holds up small, though the stacked right side closes in under heavy ink.
Meaning
Yang; the sunlit side of a hill; the bright and active principle.
The standard character, but it needs its partner 陰 to read as cosmology.
Other characters for “yang”
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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