Myer: A Free 18th Century Settlement Brush Set

[KMAlexander]

Hey everyone. Happy 2025! I hope you all are well. I’m back with a few new free resources.

First, introducing Myer! My latest free Settlement Brush set.

This set was extracted from a map allegedly carved into a powder horn by its owner, Peter Myer, in 1759. The scrimshaw has a hand-done quality that makes it perfect for fantasy. It evokes a rougher map made by a work-a-day commoner rather than an upper-crust cartographer with financial backing from royalty. There’s very little in the way of landforms here. Most of the focus here is on the forests, rivers, forts, and cities in the Province of New York at the time.

Myer can also be downloaded as a pack of individual PNGs organized by folders, the same way I manage the ABR files. This should make using my brushes with tools like Wonderdraft much more manageable—no more extracting symbols from an enormous PNG!

You can read more about Myer and download the set on my blog.

Myer in use:

myer_samplemap_color.jpg

Some of the symbols:

myersampler01.jpg
myersampler02.jpg
myersampler03a.jpg

But there's more!

Alongside Myer, I am also releasing Myer Scratch, a free 18th-century scrimshaw font extracted from the same powder horn.

1_myerscratch_intro.jpg
2_myerscratch_characterset.jpg
3_myerscratch_glyphs.jpg

It’s fairly raw, but with some post-processing, it can add a nice handcrafted feel to a map. While it comes with tons of alternate glyphs, not every glyph was accounted for—Q, V, X, and Z—and all were constructed from other letter forms on the powder horn. The numbers were also limited, so I had to do the same for 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8. As with the faked letters, I constructed them from other carvings so they maintain the feel of the set as a whole.

You can download the font from the post above, or on my new Typefaces page.