Colm Fitzpatrick
Children’s Corner
Magic tricks are a fun and enriching way to impress your friends and family, as well as learn some of history’s ancient secrets. Although not confirmed, many people believe that magic has been performed since the time of the pyramids – in fact, the Beni Hasan necropolis in Egypt has hieroglyphs showing men manipulating what looks like cups and balls.
In this trick, the magician usually places a ball under three cups, and with some conjuring practice, the balls disappear, reappear, and even penetrate the solid cups. It’s an amazing piece of skill, and one of the first tricks a magician learns when they’re beginning.
The cups and balls trick comes under the branch of close-up magic, but there are actually lots of different categories of magic such as stage magic or mentalism. In mentalism, the performer appears to have mind-reading skills, where they can read the thoughts of the audience, and even work out what hidden object an audience member may be holding in their hand. In modern times, mentalists claim to be experts in psychology and body language, but more often than not, traditional magic techniques are used in their demonstrations.
Trick
A great mind-reading trick that you can learn and perform is deducing what colour of crayon a participant has picked even though you’re looking away the whole time. For the trick, all you need is a bunch of crayons.
To begin the trick, put some crayons behind your back and mix them up. Then ask the participant to stand behind you and take one of the crayons and remember the colour. Once they have done this, ask them to hand you back the crayon in your right hand. When you can feel the crayon, turn around and face the participant so that neither of you can see the crayons behind your back.
Now here comes the tricky part! Scrape the crayon with your right thumbnail so that the wax gets stuck between your finger and nail. Remember to talk to the participant during this to ease any suspicion they might have. Once you have the wax on your thumb, return the crayon to the rest of the bunch and bring both of your hands out in front you. Begin waving your hand mysteriously and while doing this, take a peek of the colour of the crayon wax on your thumb. Now that you have this secret information you can reveal it in any creative way you’d like.
Perhaps you could say that you’re going to read the participants mind or work out the colour from their body language. The possibilities are endless! Once you have this trick down, you can start learning even more mind-blowing and entertaining tricks.