How to do Magic Tricks

Advice and Support for Magicians

How to Do Magic Tricks With a Sharpie Pen – Best Magic Tricks to Learn

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Best magic tricks with a penSimon asks: ‘I carry around a Sharpie pen and wanted to know which are the best magic tricks I can learn that use a pen?’

Magicians love to do magic tricks with a pen. Find a magician, shake him or her upside down and it’s highly likely several Sharpie pens will fall out onto the floor. However, apart from having a spectator sign playing cards, many magicians don’t know many magic tricks that use a pen. Why not use the pen and make it part of your act? Turn it into a prop. Let’s look at some of the best magic tricks to learn with a pen.

The simplest way to incorporate a pen into the magic tricks you already perform is to use a pen as a magic wand. It’s a basic idea that genuinely works. The spectators can immediately relate to this action. Using a pen as a wand encourages them to use their imagination and it gets them involved if you have them wave the pen for you.

If your looking for magic tricks to learn with a standard pen, we recommend ‘Recap’ by the brilliant magician Gregory Wilson. It is a multi phased routine using basic sleight of hand and brilliant misdirection. Recap can be performed with any pen that has a cap. It can be found on his magic DVD – On the Spot. Recap is also included in the excellent book by Paul Harris ‘The Art of Astonishment’ volume 1.

If your looking for gimmicked magic tricks that use a pen or gimmicked pens, there are many good ones on the market. Again, knowing which are good and which are not is hard to tell. Below is a list of our favorites that will easily fit into any working magicians repertoire.

Pen through anything is one of those fabulous visual magic tricks that can be seamlessly fitted into most magic acts.

Sharpie Through Card is like a cigarette through coin but using a Sharpie and Card to perform super strong visual magic. Cigarette magic is out of fashion, so using a pen and card instead is a great way to adapt the magic trick to be socially acceptable. Smudged is another fantastic visual piece of magic using the printing on a sharpie marker.

Sharp Impression takes printing magic tricks with a Sharpie to another level with a built in a device that reveals a blister revelation.

If your looking for magic tricks to learn that are more mind related, Captive ticks the box.

Finally, if you wish to use your standard pen throughout the routine and then have the pen transform in the spectators hands as a finale, Omni Pen provides an excellent solution.

 

Useless Sleight of Hand – Sleight of Hand Vs Magicians

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Is the sleight of hand you are learning leading anywhere?

What do we mean by useless sleight of hand? Useless sleight of hand is anything you don’t have an actual use for right at that moment. It’s sleight of hand that has been studied and practiced just for the sake of it.

‘These individuals have riches just as we say we have a fever, when really the fever has us.‘ – Seneca 4BC-65AD

 

Don’t collect moves without tricks. The moves will begin to control you.

Do you hang out with other magicians? If you do, you will have met a LOT of very skilled magicians who know just about every sleight or flourish going. They somehow seem to be overnight experts on THE current fashionable move being promoted in a just released magic DVD. They delight in showing you 5 different colour changes, an undetectable pass, their one handed farrow shuffle, and a La Paul spread that turns you green. It’s very easy to be disheartened by their skills.

Why aren’t I that good at sleight of hand? I practice as much as possible. What have they got, that I haven’t?

Knowing a huge range of useless sleight of hand moves, doesn’t make you a magician:

‘John? Oh yes, he’s an author you know! Yes, yes, well.. he hasn’t actually written anything yet, but he can type 70 words per minute! He’s a total master of the keyboard. Did you know, he even knows all the keyboard shortcut keys! I hear at the moment he is working on several advanced ways to cut and paste some text!‘

Before you envy them too much, ask them to show you their best magic trick. Judge them on THAT, not the individual sleight of hand moves they can perform. If they are magicians, their primary goal should be learning and performing magic. If they are collecting and mastering useless sleight of hand techniques, that’s something else instead. It could be flourishing, it may be juggling, it could even be wasting time, but it’s not working towards a goal of performing magic.

There’s nothing wrong with the past-time of learning card magic technique. After all, it could be possible to create an act which featured a demonstration of unassociated card moves and techniques. Flourishing can work really well build into an act. However, if YOUR goal is to become a master magician, then your efforts should be different to those of someone wanting to learn new variations of sleights.

What impresses the magic shop team magicians?

Like most magicians, we like watching good sleight of hand. A perfected one handed colour change is a thing of beauty. However, when a magician shows us a move built into a magic trick or routine, in a way that complements and enhances the routine, we get excited and have more respect for the magician.

Do This: Look for the best magic tricks that suit you, then master the moves and sleight of hand for THOSE tricks. If you don’t have an application for a sleight of hand technique, make note of it, but put it aside until you do.

Disassociated moves and random flourishes distract you and eat up time you could be using to become a better magician.

Ditch your useless sleight of hand and focus on what interests you and what you will actually use.

 

What Magic Books Don’t Teach You About Becoming A Master Magician.

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The path to becoming a master magician

Becoming a master magician looks like it should be a straight line going from a beginning point A to mastery of magic at point B. As comedian Dimitri Martin shows us in the picture above, success as a magician is much more of a wiggly path than a direct one.

As magicians, it’s easy to assume that the path to becoming a master magician is direct. We like to think it’s a  straight line because it’s clear and straightforward. It makes success seem reachable and direct, but reality doesn’t work like that. The messy, twisty line may be a mess, and hard to work through, but it shows us the failure, setbacks, dead end magic tricks, bad practice techniques, and all the mistakes that slow us down in the process of becoming a master magician.

Most magicians learn their trade from other magicians. We watch magic DVD’s and read magic books teaching us the magic tricks that have worked well for others. The magic DVD’s and books only show us the success’s other magicians have had. We don’t find out about the years of work that lead nowhere. The mistakes, missed opportunities and failures, every magician has experiences. Problems other magicians have faced tend to be kept private, so the journey to success seems to be a straight line.

This editing of success is fine for learning techniques. After all, it’s crucial to copy good technique and avoid mistakes or poor examples. However, as magicians, we run the risk of becoming disheartened by our own, slower progress. It’s easy to feel that we are not as good as other magicians because we see all the mistakes we make during the learning process. We are aware of every imperfection of our technique. Our honest, critical view of our own abilities can’t compete with the edited perfection of magic presented by a master magician in a magic video or book.

This is exactly the reason why many people suggest that women shouldn’t read beauty magazines if they want to be happy. The readers are presented with an unrealistic version of reality that can make the reader feel unhappy with themselves. The same magazines, often suggest commercial solutions to the problems that they create. As a magician, it’s easy to see, all the successful master magicians teaching magic, and feel that you are not as good as them.

Do This:
However you define your journey learning magic, expect a messy – but in the end, wonderful adventure.

Don’t compare yourself to hundreds of different magicians showing you their best magic tricks. Compare yourself to your previous abilities, and race YOURSELF to improve. You only have to ensure you are better that you were in the past, consistently over time, to become a master magician.