beginners Archives

Matthew writes:

‘I am having difficulty with making my hands and arms look natural when performing. When I perform a magic trick involving showing or holding something, my arms tend to squash up and seem too close together.’

No quick fix for that I’m afraid Matthew, but it’s awesome that you have identified it and want to take steps to fix it too.

That’s ‘performing tension’ and is quite common Matthew. You need to learn to relax whilst performing.

One of the biggest causes of stiff arms or hunching up of the body, whilst doing a magic trick, is thinking about what you are doing whilst you are doing it.

It’s an instinctive response from the time when we all lived in caves. When you feel insecure and need to concentrate, your brain thinks it’s in danger. It’s sending signals to your body to get ready to escape. Your body tenses up, like a spring, in case it needs to take sudden emergency action. But how do you get rid of it?

It’s not easy, is it? You have to pay attention to the audience, remember the moves, check you are doing it right, and say something interesting whilst you are doing all this!

The cure to feeling nervous when performing magic tricks is switching over to routining your magic rather than practicing. That means you need to go through the whole routine, including patter from start to finish. You do this in a slow, natural way, over and over again. Over time, you become very familiar with the WHOLE performance and your body will relax.

Seriously consider filming your performance of the trick to an imaginary audience. Do this 15 times. Don’t stop or tweak the performance mid way through. Pretend the footage is live going out on TV. Afterwards, watch it back and see how much you have relaxed the tension in your arms between the first few full performances and the end ones. That will show you the power of routining rather than practicing just the moves.

Got more suggestions for Matthew to feel less nervous when performing magic tricks? Share your ideas in the comments section below:

Dee Christopher on Creating a Persona and Style

by Merchant of Magic 2 Comments

By Dominic Reyes

Have you heard of Dee Christopher? He’s not been on TV yet, so he is isn’t in the mainstream public’s eye, but amongst magicians, his work is becoming very well established and respected. If you haven’t already experienced Dee Christophers work, check out his site here.

I want to look at a few important things we can learn from his approach to magic.

Knowing your own style.
Did you check out his website? If you did, chances are you understood the style of his magic within just a few seconds of looking at the first page of his website. Why is that? Because Dee has decided not to be a generic close-up magician. He has a persona and has created a character around the attributes associated with that persona.

Do a quick Google search for magicians in your area. Browse the sites and look at the themes and styles of the performers. 99% of them are all the same and interchangeable (I know, because I’m one of them myself) Now contrast that, to Dee’s site and the image he portrays.

A big fish in a small pond.
We are often taught that it’s better to be a small fish in a big pond, than a big fish in a small pond. That may be true in life, to give you room to grow and experience new things, but it’s not always the case when it comes to being a performer.

Now, you might love the image and style Dee presents, or it may leave you cold, but chances are, you DO have an opinion on it either way. It produces a series of preconceptions about both Dee Christopher and the mind magic tricks he would show you. Most other magicians tend to look generic, and their style gives the public very little clues as to what they will perform or if they will fit into the event a client is looking for. Because of this, they appeal to the middle ground. That’s the most competitive, crowded place to stand out in.

Dee Christopher has a niche. His appearance and magic makes him highly targeted to exactly the customers that are most likely to be the right fit for HIM. By doing this, be makes himself a big fish in a small pond. That’s a good place to be if you have a product to sell in the pond.

You don’t need to be a generic magician.
Have you ever watched a magic show where the magician is wearing a dinner suit and just looks all wrong? Maybe you have seen a young magician trying to perform a routine designed for an older magician and watched as the gags and references fall flat? That’s because beginners often feel they have to fit into a predetermined mold of what a magician SHOULD look and act like. That’s a big mistake. There really are no ‘ideal magician’ only entertainers who entertain people, and more importantly, entertainers who entertain groups of people that they fit in with and understand.

The famous magicians during the early 1900’s didn’t wear those suits because that’s what magicians traditionally wore. Previous to that, magicians tended to wear much more elaborate costumes. They dressed and acted as they did because they were copying the upper class theater audiences that would see them.

The lesson we can learn here is that your style must be your own. It doesn’t matter if it’s not the mainstream. If you have an authentic, original style, you will reach an authentic and enthusiastic market for your act. Staying away from the middle ground can really pay off, as you stand out from the crowd.

Dee Christopher is ‘Knowable’.
I talk to Dee quite often and catch up with what he is up to, and the shop often gives tips about that’s in the pipeline and what we think he would like. It’s very easy for us to do this because he has an authentic and consistent style, not only in his character, but also with the magic tricks he performs.

Fan’s of Dee Christopher can look at a new trick and instantly think ‘That would suit Dee’. Just like it’s possible to hear a song and know that it would suit a particular singer. It works in reverse too. A great trick may come along and even though it would play really well with his audience, Dee won’t perform it. He can’t, because it would not be a ‘fit’.

The magic Dee Christopher performs tends to be mentalism and psychokinetic demonstrations. His metal bending skills are world renowned, catching the attention of some of the biggest names in that field, including Uri Geller who personally endorsed him. Again, this is another niche that allows Dee to stand out from the crowd.

Do This:

1) Think about the magic you are currently performing. Does it have any consistent elements running through it, or is it a collection or random tricks that have impressed you enough to master?

2) If you do have a tendency towards a particular style of magic, could you work on building that into a full themed act and develop a persona that complements both the magic and your own style?

3) What could you change to make your act more memorable and targeted to a specific target group?

Help! My Magic Thumb Tip Doesn’t Match My Skin Colour.

by Merchant of Magic 2 Comments

We get asked about the importance of matching a thumb tip, to a person’s skin colour so many times. We now have a canned auto response stored on the email system! So we might as well publish it here too, so everyone can read it.

Does a Magic Thumb Tip need to match your skin colour?
The answer to this is no. Yes, I know this seems odd but:

‘I asked the same question. The gentleman [at the magic shop] demonstrated the standard thumb tip vanish of a silk, and I couldn’t find the tip. He then pulled it out of his fist and showed me. It was stainless steel coloured metal tip with orange tape on the end.’ – C.S Stanton

Camouflage is not why thumb tips work

The human brain is amazing. It processes so much information all at once. But it also likes to take shortcuts.

When your eye scans around a room, thousands of instances of the world are captured and passed to the brain for processing. This has to happen instantly and without us being aware of the process. To speed this up, the brain used memory and images from previous ‘frames of vision’ to reduce processing demands.

Your brain already knows what a hand looks like. It sees them quite a bit! Because of this it will not process the visual information it receives as fully as when it has to understand a new or rare object. It fills in the gaps with its memories.

Dr Lars Muckli, from the University of Glasgow Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, explains this far better than I can:

“The brain’s main function is to minimize surprise – that is what it has evolved to do. Memory and the predictive power of the brain combine in a very powerful way to allow us to anticipate our surroundings. Any kind of predictive method is an advantage to a biological system.

If you are driving a car and a pedestrian is suddenly obscured – say by a pillar box or your rear view mirror – your brain still knows where they are and where they will reappear in your line of vision. Without that ability, we would be lost in everyday life.” – Source

You don’t need to match the skin colour of your thumb tip for normal use. However, if it is going to be in view for long periods of time, or attention is drawn to is, to it becomes a focus of attention, then a general similar colour may be advisable. For normal use and magic tricks like vanishes, there is no need to match the colour

But it looks obvious to me!
That’s because you know it’s there and are taking the time to examine it. Your brain treats the thumb tip as the most important object in your field of vision.

To overcome this fear, you can do a simple experiment. Wear the thumb tip and go out shopping. Pay no attention to it and see if anyone takes a second look. Slip one on for an hour when you go out with friends. Don’t mention it and don’t keep looking at it. Just pretend it’s not there. You will quickly see that it goes unnoticed.

I tried it, and they spotted it.
If that happen while you test it out with friends, think back to how you acted. If it was the first time you put it on, chances are you kept looking at the thumb tip to see if it was hard to spot. People will pay attention to the things that they see others focus on. You may have felt that you acted totally natural, but those sideways glances down to your hand were a real give away.

Try it out with some other people and remember to ignore the thumb tip. You will see just how powerful this little device can be.

Which thumb tips do most professional magicians use?
The best selling magicians thumb tip in the world is the Vernet Classic Thumb tip. It only comes in one colour and is the thumb tip we recommend to all the magicians that come to the Merchant of Magic for tuition.

Question: Do you currently use a thumb tip? If so, does it match your skin tone exactly and have you ever had a problem because of this? Please share your experiences in the comments section below: