A Y A N E is a creative studio founded by us - Thea and Graham - to give ourselves a place where our imaginations can have free rein and we can indulge in our love of music, fantasy and fairy tales; somewhere that we can create, explore and share our own stories and the magical worlds they are set in.

Our projects weave together music, illustration, animation, photography, words and so much more. Housed within our ‘Imaginarium’ each project has its own dedicated journal where you can follow our progress and adventures as we create. You can also find these journals on our YouTube channel.

We really hope you enjoy what you find here and that it inspires you to give your imagination a little more freedom to play. If you would like to be notified when we release new content please consider subscribing to our newsletter ‘Notes’.

Once upon a time there was a little girl who loved to read. She would disappear into the magical worlds that exist within the pages of her books, down rabbit holes and through secret doors. At night she would go to sleep dreaming of the words she had read that day and wondering what the tale had in store next. Her imagination ran wild and free, weaving the words into images and music.

One day when she was much, much older inspired by a world that was emerging in some music she was writing she picked up her pen and began to write stories of her own…

We will share our writing process for each of our stories as we create them as well as all our influences and inspiration in our project journals.

I first discovered that I enjoyed writing music that told the story of an imagined scene or happening while I was studying at Trinity Laban.

As the daughter of a classically trained ballerina (and keen dancer myself) I grew up surrounded by the beautiful music from ballet scores and the fairy tales behind them. While I’ve never been more than an amateur, I have danced on stage a fair amount and choreographed many dances over the years. The combination of ballet steps, fairy tales and music is a magical one to me; when I dance the music and magic seemingly become almost tangible and it makes me feel alive and free.

So I guess it’s not really surprising that a little while later I found myself writing pieces of music inspired by my favourite fairy tales and ballet scores. Over time these pieces continued to evolve and before I knew it, I had started writing ballets based on my own fairy tales.

The first of which being ‘The Nymphs of Spring’. This ballet and its fairy tale grew organically out of an idea Graham and I had to write a piece of music inspired by everything we love about Spring by depicting an enchanted forest scene waking from its winter slumber.

You can follow our progress as we create ‘The Nymphs of Spring’ and all our projects in our Imaginarium and on our YouTube channel. In our posts and videos will go into detail about how we compose our music and create our choreography. We will also include episodes about all things music and ballet that influence our work and that we find fascinating.

Each of our Imaginarium projects exist in their own magical world, which gives me an amazing opportunity to really lean into the style of art I love to create; from concept sketches of our characters and their costumes to landscape and nature photography to provide inspiration for paintings, animation and digital art of the worlds our stories are set in, as well as the freedom to design and create the jewellery and artefacts which are key to each of our fairy tales.

In our projects journals we will share all the elements that form each project’s sketchbook.