Procreate Garden Design

Can you use Procreate or your iPad for garden design? Yes you can!

I’ve recently been designing a garden renovation for a friend in Sydney’s Northern Beaches region recently. It’s been a fun and satisfying project. I really enjoyed learning more about the native plants indigenous to the area, and dreaming about plants for sandy soils that I couldn’t grow in the garden here.

I did all the garden planning and design on my iPad. It is perfect for everything from playing with ideas, drawing to scale, developing and refining master plans and creating artistic 3D concepts. I mostly use two applications – Procreate and Affinity Designer – with an Apple Pencil of course.

Garden Design On Your iPad with Procreate or Affinity

At times designing my garden on the iPad was a slow process and it made me realise that some add-ons would really make the process so much faster. So I put my illustration skills to work and I made them!

I’ve created 2 versions – one for hobby gardeners working on ideas for their own patch, and a vector based professional version for horticulturalists and planting designs.

• The Procreate garden design brushes are ideal for hobby gardeners who just want to have fun exploring some design ideas with the help of some quick plant shape stamps that will make your design look super pro in no time.
• The Affinity Garden Design assets are ideal for pros as they include Vector based assets that can scale to any size of plan you wish to print. Affinity is also a little harder to use and an understanding of layers in design is helpful, so this isn’t really an option I would recommend for beginners. 

Available now on Creative Market from just $10 for the set, my iPad Garden Design brushes will cut your garden drawing and planning time in half.

The Affinity pack includes fully scalable Vector tree, shrub and plant brush stamps. There are over 150 design assets in total, to make your concept design process fast and creative. The set is divided in two, with a collection based on vector outlines, and a second collection of shapes with outlines along with a shape mask and a coloured watercolour fill.

The garden design shapes are so fast to use! Add a tree or shrub to your design in 2 taps, resize and reposition endlessly, change the outline and wash colour for all elements at once or one at a time, and change the outline brush to personalise your style. It is so fast and let’s you focus your time on design and plant choices rather than drawing.

In case you didn’t know, in Affinity Designer you can draw to scale, easily measure all elements exactly, add text, draw formal shapes such and buildings and paths, all in fully scalable vector mode. Switch seamlessly to pixel mode to add hand drawn elements to your design and make it your own.

I plan to record some tutorials in future to share my process for garden design using an iPad soon. But if you’re a hobby gardener then a great place to start is on Google Earth or Maps – open up your browser and go to your address on maps, select the aerial satellite view and zoom in as close as you can. Take a screenshot of your place from above. Then you can import that image into Procreate and start drawing over the top in a new layer to get your ideas in scale without the need to measure anything! Of course if you have a lot of large overhanging trees then you won’t be able to see the boundaries clearly. If that’s the case and if you have a house plan – then just take a photo of the plan and add it into Procreate. So simple!

If you have any questions or suggestions, drop me a note below. Happy garden designing!