The Princess of Hearts

The princess of Hearts, or Kokoro-hime, is my most popular creation. As depicted by the photos, the core concept is a statuette of a young lady clad in a beautiful ceremonial dress inspired by Japanese traditional clothing. The intention is to portray oriental elegance in the form of Lego bricks. Unless mistaken, Lego has never produced something similar.

By reasons, the original character is the Princess of Hearts, but she would probably fare better with a more suitable fairy tale characters like, for example, Princess Kaguya.

The model shown is a physical one, accounting for ~700 parts. It is intended for display only, and has the advantage of having a pretty small footprint.

The dress is carefully crafted to provide a realistic shape. Despite the body being covered in heavy clothing, you can still imagine her underlying body structure. The arching back, the shaping of the shoulders, all of the were carefully chosen to ensure a natural posing. I specially love the side view, where you can see her slightly arched back.

I also want to pinpoint the multilayered clothing. Up to four layers of clothing are combined, while suggesting continuity along the whole body.

The head is the core section, and provided the reference for sizing the whole body. The haircut is inspired by ceremonial hairstyle and flows gracefully in her back.

Other nice details are the back ribbon (obi) and the laces for the sandals (okobo).

Of course, character building is not new. It is really popular in the Lego building scene. If you surf the Internet you will find many incredible Lego creations featuring real people. However, it oddly surprises me that Lego has never produced such a System set, although I kind of understand it: Making a proper human body shape in Lego is tricky. Achieving the triangle of stability, sturdiness and shape can be really hard. Also, realistic builds can get easily trapped in the dreaded uncanny valley. Until now, I believe Lego has only produced buildable figures, whose heads are special custom molds.

Notwithstanding the proposed design, I believe she would greatly benefit from brick printing. The big white and red wedges would look really good with printed patterns inspired by those found in eastern formal dresses.

An alternate base, maybe shaped in the style of a Japanese garden, would also look crazy good.

The original choice of the color pattern is not trivial, but actually come from a long history, originating in Takayama town (Japan). If interested, you may read about her creative origins here:

A set of photos, including some WIP shots can be found here:

If you like this idea, please give Kokoro-hime your support and vote for her!