Pictures – Page 2 – MagicShow.Tips

FREE Magic Lecture in Portland, OR

Come learn about the magic tricks that I create!

If you’re not a magician, but “magic curious” this is a great way to get some insight into magic and also learn a bit more about the magic magic club.

If you’re a magician, there’s lot of magic to learn. This is more that tricks, there’s a lot of insight into the how’s and why’s of performing magic tricks.

This is a free event put on by the Portland Society of Magicians

January 10 at 7pm

Location: Oregon stamp society bldg

4828 NE 33rd ave, Portland OR

If you can’t make it, you can get a set of the lecture notes at:
https://www.magicshow.tips/lecture-notes-2025/

-Louie

White Board Onstage

I started using a handheld whiteboard in my show last summer. I never really thought much about it, it’s just a prop I used. Then a couple of weeks ago I saw a picture of me performing with it.

The backside of it looked like garbage. The backside was just cardboard, and it’d gotten dinged up over months of use. I went for a simple fix and just covered the back with some stick on black velvet that I had

It looks way better now! I’m glad I noticed that in the picture, it’s a small thing I could do to make my show look a little bit classier.

-Louie

Freshening Up The Magic Show

In the off season I spend time replacing worn out parts of my show. The fish bowl on the left is the one I’ve used in the show for the last year, and the one one the right is the new one.

It always amazes me how things can get beaten up slowly, and because it happens over time, I don’t notice till it’s really bad. It’s always good to check your props and clean or replace them regularly!

You might not notice the wear, but people do.

-Louie

Working on a Snake Basket…

For decades, I’ve wanted to do a snake basket that combined the two popular versions from the late 1990s. Those two were Terry Lunceford’s Viper and Collector’s Workshop’s Khyber Kobra. I wrote a blog post about those two a few months ago, which includes videos of them; you can read it here. In a nutshell, I wanted to combine the two of them, so there’s the byplay of the Khyber Kobra with the ending of the Viper.

I’ve been working on learning to use Arduino and over the summer I made a working model on an Arduino simulator, but haven’t had time to actually make it, until a few days ago.

The arrangement above has a lot of wires, but it works! All of the functions do their thing. Like any project, once it becomes a physical thing, it will change. I realized I could eliminate one motor and have one servo handle two tasks. The motor would make the snake rise, then the servo would make it move back and forth. I decided to eliminate the motor and have the servo make the snake rise and shake. That simplified this a lot, and here’s the new wiring:

Usually, simpler is better; here’s less to go wrong, and it’s easier to diagnose if something does go wrong.

The next step will be to move it from an Arduino UNO board to an ESP32 board and put everything onto a PCB board for more sturdy final version of this.

-Louie

Unforeseen Challenge!

Right now I’m writing a show that I’ll be doing for a elementary school assembly tour in April. One of the challenges is that I’m trying to avoid the whole 6 7 thing.

That makes counting tricks a challenge and there’s a card across type trick that I’ve written into the show. I don’t want to lose control halfway counting a packet of cards, and that needs to be done four times!

Right now is that my plan it to talk about the objects as I’m counting them. That would break up the 6 to 7 with dialogue between them. I’m not sure if that will work, but it’s an idea. Another idea is to use 9 items instead of the traditional 10. Then if three items move from one packet to the other, that will reduce the counting that will have the numbers 6 and 7 from four times to three times.

Another option would be to not have the trick about counting, but about specific items moving from pile to pile. So three red backed cards end up in a blue backed packet.

I’m not sure how this will play out…

-Louie

Evolution of a Joke

I had an idea for a joke about Houdini. The line I thought of was:
“Once it took Houdini 8 hours to escape a jail cell, a could lawyer could have done it in two.“
I wanted to make it as a cartoon, so I put some basic prompts into AI to make the basic picture:

Then I had AI add the caption:

For some reason it had a cropping issue at the top. Once I saw it, I didn’t like the lawyer, he didn’t need to be in the picture, so I had him taken out.

Looking at the picture above, I decided it didn’t need the word “once,” so I had it removed. Now it’s a nice, tight joke with a setup and a punchline, and the image doesn’t distract or give away the punchline.

I also rewrote the punchline, so there are two versions:

I’m not sure which I like better. I think the one on the right, as it’s tighter. The one on the left really takes the audience to the punchline, while the one on the right makes them think a little.

That’s a little insight of what goes into writing a joke.

-Louie

Coin Matrix Layout

One of the things that I’m playing with is a Coin Matrix. One thing I thought about is why the coins are in the corners of the performance area rather than in some other shape. I get that there’s a lot of tradition, as the modern coin matrix is based on Yank Hoe’s Sympathetic Coins. Then, when Al Schneider created the modern version, he called it Matrix, and I think in math, those are traditionally a square or rectangular shape.

I was playing with some other shapes and layouts for the coin matrix. A straight horizontal line, a diagonal line, however I think I’ve settled on the classic Ace Assembly layout. With a leader coin in front and the three follower coins in the back.

I really like this layout, as in my routine, there’s some other stuff that needs to happen, and it moves all of the empty spaces once the coins travel to my edge of the table, which makes the next part for me a lot easier to do!

I want to say there’s nothing wrong with the standard coin matrix layout; however, there’s also nothing wrong with changing it!

-Louie

Christmas Mindreading

Here’s a quick little mindreading trick that I came up with a few years ago.

Effect: You ask someone to think of one of the following Christmas things:
Gift – Stocking – Candy Cane – Santa – Snowman
You then tell them letters in the word they are thinking of, then finally the word!

This is a simple progressive anagram. There’s really not much to it, you follow the card below:

I remember the word NASM for the flow of the letters named. Then, for the order of the items, think of a “Gift left in a stocking, which is a candy cane from Santa.” Then if it’s none of those, it’s a snowman.

There you go, some propless mentalism for your family gathering.

-Louie

Five Minute Magic Spot

While I was on the cruise ship I was asked to do a 5-7 minute spot in the farewell shows. I don’t do short spots as often as I used to do them a couple decades ago. They stress me out because you don’t really have time to establish a character or vibe and you don’t have time to win back the audience if you lose them.

Here’s my props for the 5-7 min spot:

Here’s what I did: My stand up chop cup routine (see my lecture notes) which ends with the production of a tennis ball. Then I did a card to pocket routine with a signed card. The routine ends with the signed card coming out of the tennis ball.

One thing to note is that aside from these props, where everything happens in my hands, the only other thing I used (but not necessary) is a stool to set the tennis ball on after it’s produced, so that it’s visible the whole set. The stool was already on stage from the act before me and the one after me, so there was zero moving of props for my spot.

Oh, the black string thing is one of Nick Lewin’s Ultimate Microphone Holders. That allows me to use a handheld mic, so I don’t need to get mic’d up with a head set.

It’s an action packed 5ish mins, with a nice little surprise at the end.

-Louie

Everything Has Already Been Invented

I always hate it when people say, “Everything has already been invented.” I think it’s a way for the person who said that to:
1: Justify them not trying to be creative.
2: Used as a way to trivialize someone else’s creativity.

That said, there are a lot of ideas that are reinvented, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Many tricks from a long time ago weren’t complete because they couldn’t find the final piece of the puzzle. Sometimes a technique or material didn’t exist that would take the trick from just “meh” to amazing.

I was reading The Bat magic magazine from the 1940s on the plane home from Florida and read the Bowman’s Bullseye. Read the circled effect:

Does this sound like a modern trick? If you said The Stranger, then you’re correct! The effect is the same, but the method is quite different and wouldn’t work today. In fact, I’m not sure Bowman’s Bullseye was practical in the 1940s.

What the stranger did was create the same effect, but using techniques that would have been impossible 15 years ago, and made it practical! The two tricks are light years apart (OK, actually like 90 years) and can’t be compared, other than they are both based on the telephone tricks that were invented pretty much where the telephone was.

Keep creating!

-Louie