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I continue to practice cardistry every day.
For those of you who read last weeks blog, I signed up to Steve Faulkner’s training site for magicians. Includes many video course on cardistry, card magic and other related topics.
While following my beginners course videos, I realised that Steve also has a course on practice. This was really useful and helps you to determine what your purpose is, and what are you hoping to achieve.
What’s great about these videos is that Steve has studied training and development. I did the same about 15 years ago and studied training for about a year. Therefore I find myself relating to the approaches and learning techniques used.
I am making sure that I practice everyday but need to start writing down notes and questions etc. or even scribbles, so I have ordered a new note pad.
While I have completed the beginners course, I keep replaying the videos as I practice.
I have a nice office/man cave to practice in every night on my desk with my card mat. As I have a laptop and monitor in front of me, I will probably set it at a future point in time to start recording so that I can play back and see how I am performing.
I was beginning to get confused with all the different names for grips, so I created my own help sheet with a picture of various grips, shuffles etc. That way, I can also use these sheets of pictures to work through my moves and at the same time, attempt to remember the names of all the various manoeuvres. When taking a break from work during the day, I will be able to use these sheets for practising with the cards. A great way of unwinding.
A photo example of my instruction/reference sheets that I have prepared is at the bottom of this blog page. Where possible I took my own photos and took others examples from online references such as Steve’s site. Hence I won’t share the entire doc as being used just for my own purposes as part of my learning.
Of course, even as a beginner, you find some moves easier or harder than others. I am making good progress with swing cuts (from end grip) and riffling the cards. Dribbling the cards will need lots of practice and is quite hard for me currently. The ribbon spread is going quite well and as I become more successful doing this, I am introducing top card control.
To assist with my practising, my first brick of bikes arrived at the weekend. Currently I am using two decks, a blue and red but not sure how long I should expect the cards to last when using daily.
I intend to publish regular articles about cardistry on this blog, as soon as I have sufficient new updates to report on.
