Caravan Dreams
Three Hearts — The Story That Was Never Meant to Be a Miniature
Sep
The Three Hearts resin figure started with a photograph
Not a concept, not a character sheet, not a brief. A photograph — old, slightly faded, shot somewhere in Romania around 1915. A woman sitting on the ground, her two children pressed against her, both nursing. She is not looking at the camera with pride or discomfort. She is simply there, completely present, unbothered. There is something in her expression that refuses to be categorized: not suffering, not joy exactly — something older and more durable than both.
That photograph became Three Hearts.
From Document to Sculpture
The photograph is real. The woman is real. The moment is real.
This is what separates the Caravan Dreams series from everything Mad Priest Miniatures has built before. The Mad Priest Series was built around archetypes — characters that carry symbolic weight, figures that represent phases of the human experience. Caravan Dreams starts somewhere else entirely: with a document. With evidence that this specific moment existed, that this specific woman sat in this specific way, that her children were exactly this close.
Ivan Mata Mielgo — the sculptor behind The Story Teller — translated that photograph into 90mm of resin with 13 parts. The task was not to idealize. It was to keep the weight of the original intact.
Look at the finished sculpture beside the photograph. The posture is there. The positioning of the children is there. The quiet authority of the woman — the sense that she is the still point around which everything else moves — is there. The hands. The fabric. The expression that says: this is not hardship. This is life.
What Caravan Dreams Is
Three Hearts is the first piece in a series of four interconnected 90mm miniatures. Each one will be a chapter — not a standalone figure designed to be appreciated in isolation, but a piece of a larger scene, a larger story, a larger world.
The subject is the everyday life of a Romani craftsmen community in early twentieth-century Romania. Not romanticized. Not pitied. Documented.
The choice of subject matters. The miniature world has an abundance of warriors, dragons, plague doctors and wizards. What it almost never has is this: an ordinary woman, doing an ordinary thing, in an ordinary moment that turns out to be extraordinary because someone was there to record it — and because, a century later, someone was paying enough attention to understand what they were looking at.
For Painters: What This Piece Offers
Three Hearts is technically unlike anything in the Mad Priest catalog so far.
At 90mm, the scale opens up surface area that 1:10 busts don’t offer. The faces — the mother’s, the children’s — have room to breathe. The skin transitions, the fabric folds, the contrast between the softness of the children and the weathered solidity of the woman: all of these ask for a different kind of attention than the more theatrical pieces in the Mad Priest Series.
This is a piece for painters who work slowly. Who think about what they’re trying to say before they pick up a brush. Who want their finished piece to carry something beyond technical execution.
The palette almost suggests itself. Earth tones, warm ochres, the faded textile patterns of early twentieth-century Romani dress. But the faces are where the piece will be won or lost — because the faces carry the story, and the story is specific enough that getting it wrong will read as wrong.
The Collection It Belongs To
When all four pieces of Caravan Dreams are complete, they will form a single scene — a vignette of Romani community life that can be displayed together or appreciated separately.
Three Hearts is the anchor. It establishes what this world feels like: not exotic, not tragic, not a statement. Human. Specific. Present.
The remaining three pieces will expand that world. For now, Three Hearts stands alone — and stands well.
Technical Details
| Series | Caravan Dreams |
| Scale | 90mm figure |
| Parts | 13 high-detail resin pieces |
| Material | High-quality polyurethane resin |
| Condition | Unassembled and unpainted |
| Concept | Cosmin Costian |
| Digital Sculpt | Ivan Mata Mielgo |
| Resin Casting | Petre Neguț |
Three Hearts is the first chapter of the Caravan Dreams series — four 90mm resin figures, one story. View Three Hearts in the shop →
