A quick guide for hand drafters moving to digital design
1. You already know how to design
If you’ve been drawing landscape plans by hand, you already understand scale, layout, and plant placement. Those skills don’t change. gCADPlus simply gives you a new set of tools to express them — faster, more accurate, and easier to edit.
2. Think of CAD as a drawing board with extras
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Paper = Screen: Your design space.
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Pencils & pens = Drawing tools (lines, circles, polylines).
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Templates = Layers: Keep paths, plants, text, and symbols separate.
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Stencils = Symbols: Reusable plant and object symbols save time.
The big difference: you don’t have to redraw everything if you make a change.
3. Start small and build confidence
Try these simple exercises first:
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Redraw something familiar – trace a small section of a plan you’ve already drafted by hand.
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Add a hatch – outline a garden bed and fill it with a hatch pattern.
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Place a plant symbol – insert a tree or shrub symbol from the library.
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Add text – label the plants, just as you would on paper.
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Print to scale – see how your work comes out on paper.
Each small step builds comfort.
4. Workflows are different — and better
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On paper, if you misplace a tree, you erase and redraw.
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In gCADPlus, you click and move it.
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On paper, changing plant choices means rubbing out.
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In gCADPlus, you swap the symbol or label instantly.
These time-savers become the real reward of going digital.
5. Play to the strengths of gCADPlus
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Accuracy: Lines snap neatly, symbols stay consistent.
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Flexibility: Move, copy, scale, or undo — no wasted effort.
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Professional results: Your printed plans look crisp and clean.
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Plant schedules: Symbols can link to plant databases, saving hours of list-making.
6. Be patient with yourself
Learning CAD is a bit like switching from handwriting to typing. At first it feels slow, but once you’re fluent it’s much faster. Expect a learning curve — and remember, your design eye is already trained. The software is just a new pencil.
More?
The links on this page are designed to assist new users in learning landscape design software quickly and easily.
Using gCADPlus in the USA environment.
Step by Step (2)
Using gCADPlus in the metric environment.
gCADPlus User GuideTip:
Don’t forget that the gCADPlus User Guide has an index. Pages in the guide are easy to follow and do not require a lot of reading, as they feature many embedded ‘how-to’ movies based on real-world landscape examples. Viewing a movie can significantly assist in getting up to speed with learning to use landscape design software.
Now might be an excellent time to subscribe to our YouTube channel. There, you will find hundreds of small movies that discuss many aspects of learning landscape software. These helpful movies are all indexed, so searches such as “beginner,” “how to print,” or “how to draw a line” are all possible.
Download gCADPlus. It is free to try and can be used to follow along in these learning materials.
Tip
Although focused on our own low-cost professional landscape design software (gCADPlus), we have found that our learning materials can be helpful for those who want to learn landscape design software using AutoCAD.