Sean Logue started creating 3D art on a whim during the pandemic. Now he has a following.
By Ken Mammarella
Photo courtesy Sean Logue
When Jacqui Donahue first saw Sean Logue’s 3D creations, she immediately made room for them in the Zeppelin and the Unicorn, the North Wilmington antiques store she owns with her husband, Larry.
“They’re so fluid, and interactive with kids,” she says of his avant-garde works, the most popular being articulating fantasy animals like dragons, unicorns and extraterrestrial turtles. “He keeps evolving, taking it to the next level. And he does really interesting stuff with color.”
The colors are really interesting: All the tones of the rainbow, plus fluorescent ones, and facets that glitter or shine with polarized lines of light, attributes coming from the plates they’re built on.
Even more interesting is the way that tails, legs and other body parts can flex; some pieces change shapes like Transformers; and that most can be dropped on the floor by playful kids without breaking.
Logue began a year ago with just two shelves at the Zeppelin and the Unicorn and now fills a 55-square-foot space. In August, he is the featured artist at WorKS in Kennett Square, and he’s building up his online presence for Rogue Logue Prints at dot.cards/roguelogue. His typical pieces – “gadgets and gifts, tools and toys, organizers and oddities,” he writes on Facebook — run $25 to $40.
3D art is much more complicated than letting his two top-of-the-line printers run 12 to 24 hours to create a piece or two. Logue licenses designs (his library tops 3,000), selects the filaments (silk PLA is his most popular, and he also uses matte PLA, PETG and TPU) and picks colors. The workspace in his North Wilmington home includes lots of equipment to keep filaments dry (airtight tubs, desiccants, a dehumidifier and a filament dryer), a selection of build plates to create intriguing patterns on one facet of selected pieces and a butane torch to melt tiny strings sometimes linger after the printing is done.
“I have a lot of fun learning,” he says of this hobby, which began “very much on a whim” early in the pandemic. “And I take a lot of pride in the quality of work.”
He keeps some technically flawed pieces to remind him how his skills have grown and to demonstrate the process.
That craftsmanship shows in all his pieces, which include functional items like planters (his No. 2 item), shelving units and dice-rolling towers. They’re far smoother than what he created with his first printer. The color patterns are mesmerizing. And he understands the characteristics of each filament so some can support heavy weights and others can bend and return on their own to their original shape.
“Everything is entirely customizable,” he says, referring to color palette and size, but also names. “I can print it a dozen times, and it will always look different. I would rather do something unique.”
“I’m an introvert and I’m drawn to invertebrates and arachnids, and he has custom-made things for us to accommodate my weird ways,” says fan Sara Davis. “He’s made me a pumpkin spider, centipede, scorpion, and the most perfect little glow-in-the-dark spider that does numbers to help with my anxiety.”
Logue also loves that the hobby allows him to spend a lot of time with his 2-year-old son, Toby.
After working mostly in human resources for nonprofits, he hopes that community programming can become his next career. “My heart is in doing community work,” he says, and his resume notes he has volunteered 1,400 hours doing so. “I want to return to my roots and make it a career.”
One major aspect of that volunteering has been with disc golf, helping set up and maintain courses and train students and other players, including the annual new player clinic at Bellevue State Park. He runs the clinic as a member of the Griplock Athletics disc golf team, named for a flawed technique. It also inspires a personal mantra: “It’s not the first shot that matters, but what you do with the second.”
— The Zeppelin and the Unicorn is at 400 Silverside Road. Kennett WorKS is at 432 S. Walnut St., Kennett Square. Logue also plans this fall to be at several craft fairs, including Oct. 5 at the Brandywine Hundred Fire Company and Nov. 16 at Delcastle Technical High.