This image was used in the 'Amiga Dealer' demo. It was produced by Commodore to promote Amigas that were on display in shops. This image was shown in the 'Productivity' part.
It was often believed this image was created by Jim Sachs as well, since it came along with other Jim Sachs images for the Commodore 'Amiga Dealer' demo. But in fact, was created by Reichart Von Wolfsheild:
«There is a bit of history to this image. First off, we had very little memory for the demo, and very little time, so everyone was helping get it out the door quickly. But at that time I was also working with Gail Wellington (really the person in charge of Commodore, but given far too little credit) on a deal to get WordPerfect (and other business apps like Lotus 123) onto the Amiga. I wanted to promote the 'possibility' of Amiga getting better tools.
As to the image itself, it is actually not 32 colors, but only 16. I did not tend to put my own name on the artwork I did back then (for many reasons), but this image was one that – while it looks brutally simple – actually has a few tricks in it. Obviously, it is only 320x240, but each pixel is being placed by hand, this was literally 'pointillism' (a style I was trained in with acrylics). Jim Sachs was in the other room producing his amazing works (literally working on the stunning Trumpet image), and I was helping on the programming side, but every moment I would get I would try to come up with something that would look good that blended in with his artwork (and took very little memory). But also, Jim was famous for his amazing hand-drawn anti-aliasing (every single dot). This is very hard to do on things that are round, and things that come to a point. So I placed this insane restraint on myself even though I had almost no time.
I started with just a picture of a handwritten letter being written in a Word Processor (irony), but it was so boring it almost put me to sleep as fast as I thought of it. I considered drawing a whole hand, but this would be way too time-consuming and sort of ugly (big pinkish blob, remember, it had to look good at E3 on a large monitor), these types of drawings took hours if not days as well. I wanted to make something with a very sharp point, which is when it hit me to place a simple pencil down. So I literally worked my way from the tip backwards, seeing the scale I could use (something Lego builders do all the time) to produce the sharpest possible point at the smallest size. Given the limitation of 16 colors, I reduced the pencil as best I could and realized ... I could, of course, re-use the eraser colors in an actual stand-alone eraser, everything started to flow. I was able to make double-use of the aliasing of the dark blue giant 'W' by making the gridlines the same color, that is a lot of use out of two colors.
The paperclips followed, and keep in mind, they could not just be flipped, since the shadow had to be redrawn. I try to always add whimsy and action in an image, even one as banal as pencils and paperclips. So bent one was cute, as was adding the eraser dust.
If you blur your eyes, it came out really well I hope for such a silly simple little image. And, keep in mind, that is how we drew this type of stuff, constantly blurring our eyes since that was the only way to ensure it was actually looking good. Blurring, Flipping, and looking in B&W were quick tricks to check an image.»
(Reichart Von Wolfsheild, December 11, 2020)