Hello everyone – I’m back with a second offering today as my design team project for the new challenge at Love to Craft. I treated myself to Clarity’s 2026 Calendar, so it seemed only fitting to share my January page today as it’s the first of the month. This design is completely inspired by a couple of Barbara Gray’s SHAC sessions over on YouTube, creating these triangle trees with tracing paper – I’ve taken the easier route and used the new masks that Clarity subsequently released.

I’d thoroughly recommend finding yourself a quiet corner and a spare hour to follow Barb’s video on this, which is what I did. Here’s a quick overview of my process, starting with one of the outline masks on one of the topper cards that come with the calendar and sponging ‘uncharted mariner’ Distress Oxide through it.

Having done the first triangle, I popped the internal mask over it and then carried on creating a little group of trees in the same way (outer mask first, then cover the inked area with the internal triangle), following Barb’s choices as closely as I could with the inks I had.

Next was to decorate my winter trees with a mixture of polychromo pencils and Posca pens – you can find Barb’s session on this here.

Having done that, I used one of the curved masks from the Triangle Trees set to create the ground, brushing and sponging ink across it, and also brushed a little ‘tumbled glass’ into the sky area. Oh, and I also drew trunks into place so the triangles really did look like trees!

And these seasonal trees for January perfectly fit the ‘winter’ theme at The Four Seasons challenge.

I don’t get time to join Barbara in the SHAC online sessions on a Monday morning, so it was a real treat to find a spare hour after Christmas to sit and do this one. I now need to start thinking about the design for my February page! I also wanted to say thank you for coming on this crafty blog journey with me – looking forward to more creativity in the coming year!