But sanctuary life is a 24-hour responsibility.

There were early mornings, whatever the weather, and endless jobs that simply couldn't wait. After almost ten years, the physical side of it began to take its toll.

We'd started thinking about changing our lives around five years earlier. It took another three years before we seriously began thinking about what that change might look like.

For once, we wanted to think about ourselves.

It sounds terrible when you say it like that, but after years of putting animals and everyone else first, we needed a different kind of life. Something less physically demanding. Something that would give us room to be creative again.

And that's where the story takes a bit of a turn.

Art has always been part of our story

Art has actually been part of our lives for a very long time.

It's also how Max and I first met — although neither of us could have known then where that first meeting would eventually lead.

I'd left my home town of Retford to study art in Nottingham before moving into training in audiovisual graphics design. Later, I returned to Retford to study Special Effects Makeup and moved into student accommodation.

When I turned up to arrange my room, Max was sitting in the office.

She was from Derby, only about 45 minutes away, and had also decided to move into the same accommodation.

I can still remember that first moment. Almost 32 years later, I can still remember what she was wearing and how she looked.

I later discovered that while I was moving in, Max had been watching me from an upstairs window.

I jokingly called her my stalker.

Within five days we were officially going out — or, as the Americans might say, going steady.

We bonded over our shared love of Special Effects Makeup and science fiction. Max was a huge Star Trek fan and dreamed of working for Michael Westmore. I was firmly in the Star Wars camp and imagined working with people like ILM or Phil Tippett.

Neither of us ended up following quite the path we'd imagined.

But the love of art stayed with us.

Then came the artwork

Before Wispy Cloud Studio existed, I had been experimenting with digital art myself.

I'd created some cat-themed images and imagined that one day I might sell them online. There was just one small problem.

I hadn't really thought about who I was selling them to.

In other words, nobody.

I was creating images I liked rather than creating something with a particular person or purpose in mind. I also spent far too much time trying to make everything perfect. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, which isn't always the most useful quality when you're trying to build a business.

I even paid for an online course with mentoring, hoping it would point me in the right direction.

Well... how wrong was I? It seemed to do little more than drain the bank account.

It did, however, get me thinking more seriously about finding a particular niche — and that's where things started to change.

Max decided to have a go at digital art herself.

And, rather unexpectedly, Max created the artwork that became Wispy Cloud Studio.

The first pieces that really caught our attention were what became our Threads and Dreamy collections.

The Dreamy style actually started with an experiment. I'd been playing around with image prompts and had tried different effects — cartoon, etched, watercolour, stained glass and others.

The combination of the etched and stained-glass effects caught my eye.

The style had something about it.

But the subject matter wasn't right.

That's when Max suggested trying different animals, particularly woodland animals.

And suddenly it all clicked.

We looked at those first images and thought:

“Wow. These would look great in a nursery.”

That was the beginning.

Not a business plan.

Not market research.

Just an image that made us feel something.

More than something to put on a wall

That's really what sits behind everything we create.

We don't want to make things simply because we can.

Every piece has to feel right.

It needs to have a little imagination in it. A sense of wonder. Perhaps even the feeling that there is a small story hiding somewhere inside it.

Animals are a natural part of that because they've always been such a big part of our lives.

And everything we create needs to fit the world we're trying to build — dreamy, timeless, imaginative and made to feel special.

We hope that someone might choose a Wispy Cloud print for their baby's nursery today and, years from now, that same image might still bring back a memory.

Perhaps their child won't remember where the print came from.

Perhaps they'll simply remember that it was there.

And maybe, one day, they'll want to keep it for their own children.