L’Isle: A Free 18th Century Battlefield Brush Set for Fantasy Maps

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.

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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 (it’ll also work with GIMP, Affinity Photo, and I’m told Procreate now) 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’re black and on a transparent background, so they’ll look broken in some browsers, but trust me, they’re all there. Like this set? Click here to learn how you can support this project.

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As with all of my previous brush sets, L’Isle is free for any use. I distribute my sets with a Creative Common, No Rights Reserved License (CC0), which means you can freely use this and any of my brushes in personal or commercial work and distribute adaptations. No attribution is required. Easy peasy!

Enjoy L’Isle? Feel free to show me what you created by emailing me or finding me on Twitter. I love seeing how these brushes get used, and I’d be happy to share your work with my readers. Let me see what you make!

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🗒 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.

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Support this Work

Brushes and tools released through the #NoBadMaps project will always be free and released under a public domain CC0 license. If you’d like to support the project and help me cover the cost of hosting, research, and tool-set development, I’ve put together three ways you can help, and all are detailed below.

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