Several parts combine into one character.

In its traditional form 畫, the character shows a hand holding 聿 (a writing brush, the pictograph at the top) drawing lines across 田 (a field). The original meaning was concrete and agricultural: "to draw boundary lines around a field." From this single image, three meanings unfolded along the same conceptual root: a picture (lines drawn on paper), a plan (lines drawn around an idea to define it), and a stroke (a single line within a written character). Japan and Mainland China both simplified to 画, dropping the brush component, while Korea preserves the traditional 畫 in formal contexts.

画 is a famous 破音字 (tone-shifting character) — one character with two readings depending on which meaning is intended. In Korean, "hwa" (화) covers picture/plan: 畵家 (hwaga, painter), 計畵 (gyehwa, plan); while "hoek" (획) covers the writing-stroke meaning: 字畵 (jahoek, character strokes), 一畵 (ilhoek, one stroke). Korean students learn this split early when memorizing kanji stroke counts.

Mandarin huà, 4th tone. 画家 (huàjiā, painter), 画画儿 (huà huàr, "to paint a picture"), 动画 (dònghuà, animation — literally "moving pictures"), 漫画 (mànhuà, comics — Chinese borrowed back from Japanese manga but often used in mainland for both Japanese manga and Chinese comics), 计划 (jìhuà, plan). Note that mainland Chinese usually writes "plan" as 计划 with 划 instead of 画 — a parallel character with overlapping function.

Japanese has two on-readings, splitting the same way as Korean. ガ (ga) for the picture/plan meaning: 映画 (eiga, movie / "projected picture"), 絵画 (kaiga, painting), 漫画 (manga, comics — the global cultural export), 画家 (gaka, painter). カク (kaku) for the stroke meaning: 画数 (kakusū, stroke count of a kanji — essential for dictionary lookup), 企画 (kikaku, project / planning), 計画 (keikaku, plan). The Japanese ガ vs カク distinction is the perfect mirror of Korean 화 vs 획.

Memory aid: a brush drawing lines across a field — the lines themselves became picture, plan, and stroke.