BucsTex

I need to get large graphic versions of some kanji that I want to paint on Taiko heads. Any ideas?

I want to have one of two things on there: our group is called Spring-Ford Percussion, so I want to either have each drum with one word (Spring, Ford, and Percussion) or individual Japanese letters S, F, P, if the characters look cool.

I don't really know what I'm doing, so any guidance is appreciated.

Thanks!

yugknup

Hi,

Japanese doesn't use an alphabet, so to do letters you have to transliterate the pronunciation of the acronym. So "SFP" would be:
エス・エフ・ピー
esu efu pii

The whole name transliterated into Japanese would be:
スプリング・フォード・パーカッション
supuringu fohdo paakasshon

(by the way, the dots just separate the words; if the words are separated some other way [i.e. on different drums] they don't need to be there)

As for large graphics, it is somewhat difficult to do well on a computer, but you can get the basic shape easily, and then do the rest by hand. If you can see the above, then you should be able to copy and paste it into Word or Wordpad to play with the font, and bump up the size. There are lots of unicode fonts you can download and install here: Japanese Unicode Fonts
All you need to do is find a font you like, print it out big enough so that you can draw a grid over it, then draw an enlarged version of the grid at whatever size you want and use it to copy the outline of the characters. Then you can paint it however you like!

BucsTex

Thanks for your help. That's katakana, right? Or not... I'm pretty new to Japanese!

I'm actually hoping to find kanji for the three words, I like the way those look a lot better. I've found versions of "spring," as in a coiled piece of metal that rebounds, "ford," as in a place to cross a river, and "drum," since I have been unable to find percussion. Interestingly, I cannot find a kanji for taiko!

Anyway, I've found some kanji that I'm happy with, I just can't enlarge them very well. If I must, I will do some finagling to enlarge them, but I was hoping someone (maybe in Japan) might be able to direct me to some vector files or something.

yugknup

Yep that's katakana. That's how it'd be written it in Japanese. They can look cool with the right font, because they're spiky

Just writing those words in kanji is possible, though, so as that's what you want:
発条 (bane) is 'spring'

浅瀬 (asase) is 'ford' (well, shallow water, but it is used in the way we use 'ford' too)

打楽器 (dagakki) is 'percussion'

Taiko is 太鼓

Most fonts are vectors (TrueType fonts definitely are).

cunning_stunts

Hi there!

There are some good Kanji fonts available for download here:

æ¼¢å*—ã�Œä½¿ã�ˆã‚‹æ—¥æœ¬èªžãƒ•ã‚©ãƒ³ãƒˆ 無料ダウンãƒ*ード 46種類 : 4GALAXYã�®ãƒ¡ãƒ¢

BucsTex

Oh cool... now the question is, how do I get the kanji that I'm looking for on an English keyboard??!?

BucsTex

Thank you very much! I'm glad I found someone who could tell me the kanji for percussion. Those are definitely what I want on the drums. I'll try cut and pasting them for a starting point.