For a while, I’ve been releasing brush sets with the goal of aiding fantasy authors (and GMs, or anyone really) to create vibrant maps that really showcase their imaginary worlds. Personally, I love maps, a good map can draw me into a story and enhance the world.

Today’s brush set is a little different from previous offerings. Instead of focusing on landscapes, today’s set focuses on the battlefield. Violence, battle, and war is a common theme in fantasy and I figured this set would be perfect for those who are wanting something a bit different.

I’m calling this set L’Isle. The symbols are taken from the Plan Batalii map which was included in a special edition of The First Atlas of Russia in 1745. The map details the plan of battle near Stavuchanakh in Moldova, between the Imperial Russian Grand Army and the Turkish and Tartar Armies. The set is named after Joseph Nicolas de L’Isle who supervised the production. Usually, I name sets after the artist/engraver but this time around it was difficult for me to pin down the specific creator.[1]

With the help of my friend Redd, we translated the antiquated German from the original document. It tells a blow-by-blow of a battle during the Russo-Turkish War of 1735–1739. There’s a bit of a bias here—the Turks and Tartars are depicted as an unorganized horde while the Russian forces are shown using more standard and organized military symbols. But the symbols in themselves can work for anything: masses of soldiers, invading orcs, barbarians, an elvish army, fish men, whatever. If you’re looking to render elevation, I highly recommend pairing these symbols with Lehmann, my hachure brush set (you’ll need Adobe Illustrator.)

Inside L’Isle you’ll find, over 500 brushes, including:

51 Organized Unit Markers

75 Individual Horde Soldiers

85 Horde Armies

2 Tiny Tent Rows

40 Small Tents

13 Medium Tents

9 Large Tents

2 Extra Large Tents

5 Churches (Technically there was only one, but I did some Photoshop magic.)

20 Villages

25 Individual Homes

50 Individual Trees

25 Forests

30 Flags

3 Bunkers

13 Gun Batteries

47 Canons (Firing and Silent!)

13 Action Symbols (Explosions! Sword fights!)

4 Random Objects

The button below links to a ZIP file that contains a Photoshop brush set and two transparent PNGs in case you’re using a program that doesn’t support Adobe brush files. You can see the two transparent PNGs at the following links: Units and Elements (they’ll come up black if viewed in Chrome, but they’re all there.)

DOWNLOAD L’ISLE

As with all of my brush sets, L’isle 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, L’isle and his engravers did all the heavy lifting—so giving them credit would be fantastic, but it’s absolutely not necessary.

If you like the L’isle 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 urban fantasy novels for yourself or a friend. (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. When my 2nd book in the series launched I made a map for the world, you can check it out here.

🗒 Notes

1 Normally, I like to name the brush sets after the artists who created them. However, all I could find out was the engravers who worked on the atlas as a whole—and even then I only got their last names: Ellinger, Unversagt, Zubov and Rostovtsev. So L’Isle gets the honor of the naming, since he was attached and he supervised the production of the The First Atlas of Russia for the Russian Academy of Sciences.

🗺 More Map Brushes

L’Isle isn’t the only brush set I’ve released. Below are links to other free brush sets with a wide variety of styles, you should be able to find something that works for your project.

Widman A 17th Century brush set pulled from the 1680 Alta Lombardia map of Northern Italy, engraved by Georgio Widman for Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi’s atlas published in 1692. If you like mountains and mountain ranges this is the set for you.

Walser A 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. You can see how far Vignola’s style persisted as well.

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.

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 captures the hand-drawn style unique 19th Century hachure style mountains.

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