Aubers: A Free 18th Century Cartography Brush Set for Fantasy Maps

I’ve always been fascinated by the early maps of North America; the history of the continent is clear in the signs and symbols. You can see the colonizers march slowly across a wild continent and read their fear of both the indigenous population and the unknown landscape. The colonized and the colonizer and the ramifications therein is a common story throughout history, and it’s a story that’s been told many times in fantasy literature. It’d make sense there would be a desire for maps that can help tell those stories.

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With that in mind, I’d like to introduce my newest free brush set: Aubers. The set comes from Carte d’une partie de l’Amerique Septentrionale which shows the journey of François Pagès a French naval officer who accompanied the Spanish Governor of Texas on a lengthy exploration through Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico in 1767. The map was engraved by J.B.L. Aubers under the direction of Robert Bernard in 1782. It’s particularly interesting because it details the settlements of the indigenous peoples of Mexico and the American Southwest. You can also see the reach of Catholic missionaries during the late 18th-century. It’s a momentary glimpse of Nueva España frozen in time.

Stylistically it’s unique. Aubers has an interesting way of rendering flora and his landforms have a style that sets his work apart from other engravers. Within this set, you can also observe a transition happening in cartography. Aubers blends the detailed pictographic style common in early 18th-century work with newer and cleaner icons that would dominate the 1800s. Instead of rendering small pictograms we see a transition to cleaner and simpler signs used for larger settlements (circle with the dot) and forts (simple squares.) It’s an interesting blend and a harbinger of something that would eventually standardize over the next century.

Inside Aubers you’ll find over four hundred brushes, including:

• 15 Major Cities
• 15 Large Towns
• 10 Small Towns
• 50 Habitations (These normally used to mark farms or tiny villages)
• 4 Archdioceses
• 2 Dioceses
• 20 Forts
• 10 Missions
• 25 Native Villages
• 3 Native Villages with Missionaries
• 4 Port Indicators
• 100 Scrub Trees
• 75 Scrub Land
• 50 Mountains
• 40 Mountain Ranges
• 3 Volcanos!
• 2 Map Cartouches
• 10 Numbers (0-9)
• 2 Odd Brushes that I couldn’t really categorize

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 a transparent PNG in case you’re using a program that doesn’t support ABR brush files. You can see the transparent PNG here. 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, Aubers 2.0 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 Aubers? 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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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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