Many engraved maps from the 17th century, especially Italian maps, were heavily inspired by Italian cartographer Cantelli da Vignola and his influence extended throughout lifetimes. In doing map research, I thought it’d be great to look into his impact and from that, I decided it was necessary to build out an enormous set of new free brushes for your fantasy maps. (It’s a sickness, okay.)

Today I’m releasing Widman, a brush set of Italian design named after the engraver. The symbols in this set are pulled from the 1680 Alta Lombardia map of Northern Italy, engraved by Georgio Widman for Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi’s atlas published in 1692. It’s a solid set with a heeeavy focus on mountains (over one-hundred!) as well as a wide variety of forts, villages, cities, and towns.

I find when creating your own map, it’s helpful to have a variety of brushes with subtle differences for each symbol. It adds a hand-made quality to the work. No engraver is perfect, ink bleeds, and the tooth of the paper can affect printing. The quickest way to making a fantasy map look machine-made is the repetition of the same symbol over and over and over. With that in mind, the Widman set is enormous allowing for the subtle differences to help make your map feel more alive and vibrant—it gives the work a human quality.

Inside Widman you’ll find, over 500 brushes, including:

25 Villages

40 Towns

45 Cities

25 Forts

14 Fortified Cities

16 River Crossings

50 Individual Trees

50 Forests

100 Mountains (Hope you like mountains.)

50 Mountain Ranges (As I said.)

42 Hills topped by Settlements

7 Unique Settlements

36 Administration Symbols

Plus More

The button below links to a ZIP file that contains a Photoshop brush set and a transparent PNG in case you’re using a program that doesn’t support Adobe brush files. You can see the transparent PNG here (it’ll come up black if viewed in Chrome, but it’s all there.)

DOWNLOAD WIDMAN

As with all of my brush sets, Widman is free for any use and is distributed with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License that means you can freely use it in commercial work and distribute adaptations. All I did was convert it to brushes, Georgio Widman did all the heavy lifting—so giving him credit would be fantastic, but it’s absolutely not necessary.

If you like the Widman brush set (or any of my free brushes, really) and would like to support my work, instead of a donation, consider buying one of my weird speculative fiction novels. (The first books is only $2.99 on eBook.) You can find them in stores and online, learn more about the series at bellforgingcycle.com.

I hope you enjoy using Widman, it was a labor of love and I think it’s robust enough to handle all manner of projects and help give your fantasy maps a refreshing and unique edge. Plus that extra connection to history can make a project feel alive. Feel free to show me what you created by sending me an email! I love seeing how this stuff is used and I’d be happy to share your work with my readers.

Want to see the other cartography brush sets I’ve created?

Walser An 18th Century brush set based on the work of Gabriel Walser with a focus on small farms and ruins and a solid set of mountain and hills. This is a great brush set to see how Vignola’s influence persisted across generations. It was etched over 80 years after the Widman set but you’ll find a few familiar symbols within.

Lumbia A sketchy style brush set I drew myself that focuses on unique hills and mountains and personal customizability. My attempt at trying to channel the sort of map a barkeep would draw for a band of hearty adventurers. It includes extra-large brushes for extremely high-resolution maps.

Lehmann Named after Austrian topographer Johann Georg Lehmann creator of the Lehmann hatching system in 1799, this is a path-focused brush set designed for Adobe Illustrator that attempts to captures the hand-drawn style unique 19th Century hachure-style mountains.

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