Portrait

Portrait by Stasia Burrington

This is one of my favorite two person code effects. Not solely based on the strength of the effect. But because it’s kind of equally fun for everyone involved: the sender, the receiver, and the people watching. It’s silly but can be very baffling as well.

You won’t like the method but… tough shit.

Imagine

I’m with my friends Charles and Juliana. (They’re not a couple, just friends.)

“Charles, have you shown her that thing you’re doing with the portraits?”

Charles demurs. “Oh, nah. It’s not that interesting.”

“It is!” I say. “You have to see this,” I tell Juliana. “He draws these portraits that are just so unbelievably rich and realistic, that you can sense so much about the subjects that you seemingly shouldn’t be able to know. It’s freaky. You should show her.”

We get some paper and a marker.

“Think of any profession,” I say to Juliana, “and he’ll draw the face of someone in that profession. It’s uncanny.” I step away from the table. “Actually, I don’t want to know what he’s going to draw. I want the experience of it dawning on me when I see it. So you two figure it out.”

I take a couple more steps and turn my back to them. Charles has Juliana whisper the name of a profession in his ear. From this point on he never says anything, he just starts to draw. As he draws, I tell Juliana to tell me when he’s done.

He takes his time. Pausing as he goes to make sure the image is coming together perfectly. After a few moments she clues me in that he is done. I turn to the two of them and Charles shows me this stunningly detailed portrait.

“Ah! The quintessential portrait of a lawyer!” I say, the moment I see the drawing.

Charles takes a small bow. “Do you want to see it again?” he asks Juliana. She says she does. I turn back around.

Charles gets another profession and draws this portrait.

When he’s done I turn around.

“Oh wow,” I say, impressed. “Uhm… that’s not some kind of doctor is it?” Juliana shakes her head.

“It’s strange. Because there’s something about the eyes that says he does something with the human body and deals with injuries or something like that. Oh wait! I see what it is. I didn’t pay enough attention to that smile of his. He works with his body, and the injuries are his own. He’s a football player!”

At this point, Juliana is truly losing it. She’s trying to figure out what’s really going on.

“Wait,” I say, “Can you really not see the knowledge of the law expressed in this man’s features? Or the abuse the body has taken reflected in the eyes of this picture?”

Given that the pictures are pretty much identical and look like they were drawn by a 6-year-old, no, she can’t quite discern these details.

She suggests Charles must be doing something in the image to signal what the profession is. Maybe writing something in the hair? I tell her to look closely, there’s nothing there. I point out that I’m across the room. How could I see anything even if it was there?

Charles suggests that we do it again. He’ll draw the image but they won’t show it to me. Instead Juliana will draw her own copy of Charles’ drawing. So she knows there’s nothing secretly hidden in the drawing.

We go through this process. Juliana shows me her drawing. “It’s a baker,” I say. It is.

Now Juliana wants me out of the room when the drawing is being made. I go down the hall into the bathroom while Charles draws. When I come back there is a new drawing on the table. I sit down and examine it.

“Let’s see. Hmm… this is a little more nuanced. Is it a mechanic? Or someone who does something with cars?”

It’s a mechanic.

For one final test I go into the other room. Juliana whispers (just to be safe) a profession to Charles. He draws a portrait. She copies the portrait and brings it to me in the bathroom. I open the door. I take her drawing of Charles’ drawing, of a completely nondescript person, that is identical to all the other drawings they’ve already done. I look at it for a moment. “This guy is stressed,” I say. “Look at the anxiety in those eyes…He’s an airline pilot.”

He is.

A few weeks later the three of us are meeting up for coffee. I take a look at a book Charles is reading and a business card sized bookmark falls out of the book. Drawn on it is another one of those portraits. I notice the image. “C’mon, Jules. You can do it. What is this person’s profession?”

“Oh, it’s obvious,” she plays along. “He’s a carpenter.”

“Hey! How about that! She got it. The ears give it away. See? I told you there was no trick to it,” I say.

I slide the bookmark to Charles. He takes it and passes it across to Juliana. “You keep it,” he says. “It’s my gift to you. Hold onto it. There’s actually been a bit of a buzz about my portraits in the art world recently. It will be worth some money some day.”

She picks up the card. Looks again at the picture. “I’ll cherish it,” she says.

As she goes to put the card in her purse she notices something written on the back…

Method

Here is the image of the lawyer being drawn. If you want to try and figure out what’s going on, don’t scroll any further. Watch the video before reading the rest of the post.

The secret?

It’s Morse code.

The receiver listens for the sound of a long line, which is the sender drawing the outside of the face. After they hear that line, they know to pay attention. The morse code is done while scribbling the hair.

There’s no need to do the full word, just enough letters to give the other person the idea of what it is. For “lawyer,” my friend just had to code L-A-W.

So “L A W” in morse code is:

L = ⚫ — ⚫⚫

A = ⚫ —

W = ⚫ — —

For the sake of this demonstration video, I had my friend use a fat black marker to exaggerate the sound. You don’t need to. A sharpie works fine.

Go back to the video and just listen to the sound once the marker starts to draw the hair. Don’t pay attention to the lines the marker is drawing, just listen to the sound.

You’ll hear:

short, long, short. short

pause

short, long

pause

short, long, long

You might think, “I’d never be able to hear that!” But once you become familiar with Morse code, it’s very easy to pick up on these differentiations. And when drawing, the person can make the “long” sounds very long, which means the short sounds don’t have to just be taps. The general rule we use is that if it sounds like it could be a single line it’s a dot, if it sounds like multiple lines back and forth it’s a dash.

So now I’ll walk you through the the beats of the trick above, because we sort of switched it up as we went.

First Phase -

Charles sent the letters L-A-W. I knew that would be “lawyer.”

Second Phase -

Charles sent the letters F-O-O-T. Now, ideally we want to send letters that signal the actual name of the profession. But in practice we found that sometimes it was easier to send the letters that spelled what they worked with. So when I got “FOOT” I had three immediate thoughts:

• Football player

• Podiatrist

• Shoe salesman

I discounted the last one, because I figured he would have sent SHOE for that, which would have made me say “shoe salesman” or “shoe designer” or something like that. And I probably could have eliminated “podiatrist” as well, as he would likely have sent PODI for that. (If he just sent POD I probably would have said “podcaster.”)

But with both podiatrist and football player in my head, I did a little fishing. While it can be hard to fish between the Four of Clubs and the Queen of Diamonds in a way that seems innocent, I have complete confidence in myself that I can dance my way between any two different professions and find some connection between the two.

Third Phase - Charles sent BAK. He probably should have gone ahead and sent BAKE, as that would have been completely obvious. But after a few seconds thought, I figured that BAK is Baker.

Fourth Phase - I left the room and when I came back I sat at the table with them both. As we sat together there, Charles tapped MECH on my foot. “Mechanic.”

Fifth Phase - This was just a real cheat. As Juliana brought me her copy of the drawing, Charles quickly texted me what it was. Isolated from the other phases, this might have been an obvious conclusion for her to jump to. But I think laypeople are less likely to assume you’re using multiple methods. So since she knew he wasn’t texting me anything in the previous phases, I think it didn’t jump out as an obvious solution in this phase.

The bathroom was far enough away from where we were hanging out that he had the few seconds he needed to text “pilot.” But just to be sure, I had locked the door. If she had showed up before I got the text and put away my phone, I was going to wait for the text, then flush the toilet, as if I had just taken the opportunity to take a leak while I was waiting. So there was no chance of her coming in before I got the text.

We had worked out a bunch of possible contingencies in regards to how he would signal the letters or the word to me beforehand. Charles is one of my friends from back in NYC, so we have been doing this sort of thing together for years and can usually improvise our way around any possible challenge. We also both use sign language, so I knew I could get the letters by surreptitiously looking at the way his hand was resting on his leg, if it came to that. And we had another way of transmitting the Morse code where a picture frame in the hallway reflected the a mirror in the dining room, which reflected the living room. So one of us could flash our camera’s flashlight in the living room and the other could get the signal three rooms away with two walls between us.

Sixth Phase - This used another technique I use frequently with a wingman: lap-writing. Charles had two business-card sized pieces of blank card. Each with an identical face on it (similar to the face he drew for all the other phases). And his signature and the year 2021 on the back. One of these cards was in his lap, the other was in his book. I took that card and showed it to Juliana and asked her what the profession was. When she named a profession, I spent a few seconds congratulating her and pointing out the subtle signs she picked up on. As I did this, Charles wrote that profession on the back of the card in his lap as if it was the title of the picture. There was no rush. It’s one word. And she was distracted.

I slid the card we’d been looking at over to Charles, he pulled it towards him, lapping it, and in the same motion brought out the other card. This sort of switch can be pretty much invisible even if someone is paying attention. And in this case there was no reason to be paying attention to that moment, so it completely flew by.

That’s it. While learning Morse code and working with a partner is a lot of work for one effect. These are things that I consider part of my “toolbox” for creating effects. So I don’t look at them as being part of one effect, but a useful building block for many.

Learning Morse code and practicing signaling the information back and forth should be an enjoyable process. So don’t pick someone you have to drag into this because it does take some effort. You can be competent enough in Morse code to do tricks with it—starting from no knowledge—in about an evening. There are online trainers you can find for Morse code, but the truth is that’s all kind of overkill for the purposes of magic. You just need to know the letters and symbols, you don’t need to know them with any speed. Even the slowest speed you see on those trainers is much faster than you ever need to use the information in performance.

But again, learning this stuff should be fun. If the idea of ordering some pizza and inviting your magician friend or wingman over and working on this stuff doesn’t seem like an enjoyable way to spend a few hours, then of course it would be stupid to spend your time doing so. But if you are into it, and you find someone else who is intrigued by the process of learning and practicing this type of thing, then definitely put the time in to learn some two-person coding. I find Morse code to be the best because it’s the most useful. You can signal Morse code through any sense: touch, hearing, sight… you could even do it with taste or smell, theoretically. But even if you just learn some simple party-stunt type coding tricks, I think you’ll still enjoy yourself. Appreciating the deviousness of a magic method is usually a solo pursuit. It’s nice to be able share that with someone.