Native Garden Planner

Learn how to quickly create and refine landscape areas using the Brush and Eraser tools in Native Garden Planner! In this quick tutorial, we'll show you how to paint and erase shapes to build natural-looking garden beds, mulch areas, lawns, and more.

This video is part of the NGP Basics series — a step-by-step playlist that covers everything you need to know to design your first native garden, from creating a project to choosing plants and exporting your finished design.

In this video you'll learn:

How to use the Brush tool to paint new areas
How to use the Eraser tool to remove or reshape areas
How to adjust brush size for precision or speed
Tips for creating organic, natural-looking landscape features
When to use the Brush and Eraser tools instead of drawing shapes

Transcript

[0:00] Hey everybody, welcome back to designing a simple garden. We've already covered the many ways to create shapes — simple shapes, freeform polygons, lines — but sometimes you just want to draw something freehand. Maybe it's a pathway, or a shape that doesn't quite fit any of those tools. That's where the brush tool comes in.

Using the Brush tool

[0:31] Click the brush tool in the control panel and a small settings panel appears. From there you can configure:

Fill — choose a solid color or one of the built-in surface patterns (grass, stone, sand, wood chips, brick, etc.)
Scale — controls how large the pattern tiles appear
Brush size — how wide the stroke is as you paint on the canvas
Join style — whether stroke segments join with sharp corners or round caps. For organic shapes like stepping stones, round is usually what you want.

Once configured, click and drag on the canvas to paint. While you're drawing, the stroke renders as a solid color to keep things fast — the pattern fills in once you release. Each drag creates a separate brush stroke entity you can move, rotate, or group independently.

Here's an example walkthrough — a stepping stone path and a sandy beach around a pond:

Select the natural stone pattern, set scale small, join style round
Click and drag short strokes for each stepping stone
Switch to a sand pattern and paint a larger stroke around the edge of the pond

Using the Eraser tool

[2:28] The eraser works the same way as the brush — click and drag over any brush stroke area to remove it. You can adjust the eraser size the same way you adjust brush size. Use a larger size for quick removal of big areas and a smaller size for precision cleanup along edges.

Organizing brush strokes

[2:51] Each brush stroke shows up as its own item under the Brush Strokes section in the Settings sidebar. If you've painted several strokes that belong together — like all your stepping stones — you can select them all and group them. Once grouped, they move, rotate, and flip together as a single unit.

The brush and eraser are the right tool whenever you want to quickly sketch in a surface area without worrying about precise polygon points — especially for pathways, organic mulch edges, or anything with a freehand feel.