I HAVE HAD THIS SCREENSAVER BEFORE and I also have a hard time relocating it!

I last saw it in 1998 though. 1998 should help

One crappy place I usually look for rare screensavers is themeworld (which should seriously be archived as there's rare-ass promotional screensavers from the early/mid 90s)

It's a long shot, but does it happen to be this one?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMATICvHsYM
the pencil looks like it's on speed, but apparently you can tweak that. It's numbered "2", so maybe what you remember was the first version.

And yeah, search results for software (and for almost everything else lately) are full of not just malware, but tons of useless content-harvesting and keyword-spamming sites that dynamically generate landing pages and steal rankings from legitimate pages just to fill up the web with lame garbage. The internet's a trash heap.

I don't think that is it; the screensaver had no "pointer" (pencil or whatever) of any kind and did not take images from the hard drive like Auto Draw does, as far as I remember (it would actually draw certain parts like a background and then draw over to make other parts, and you can't "make up" that kind of information for a random supplied image)

But hey, at least I know one other person knows what I'm talking about 😜
I'm wondering if it was a bundled thing with the Gateway computer, or if it was obtained later. If the former it could be a worth checking out restore materials for period machines.

I too remember this one. The paintings were in color and the traces appeared to be a lot thicker than a pencil's. The sax thing is what actually rang the bell for me.

The only time I saw it I was in a computer store buying diskettes, and I recall having noticed a large batch of Mortal Kombat 3 boxes sitting on the shelf so chances are it's at least as old as the game.

Hey, I remember that one too!

I could be getting it confused with something else, but I think it was part of a collection that also included a flying waffle irons screensaver. Unfortunately Google is not helpful when it comes to those terms.

Perhaps it's the After Dark screensavers?:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark_%28software%29

The OP may be thinking of the Artist module.

Nope. I just booted my old Powerbook G3 which had AD on it, and the Artist module just takes existing images and filters them gradually. It doesn't draw from scratch.

It looks to me like the only way to find this (barring somebody actually having it on them) is going to be blindly running into it while scouring old shareware/etc discs or stuff like that. We do have a closer time frame now. 1996-1998. (Barry mentioned MK3, which the PC version came out for in 1996, and 1998 seems to be last "in the wild" sighting by leileilol)

MK3 on the PC arrived in 1995. So a more acurate time frame would 1995-1998.

Ah, my bad. I just went by whatever Wikipedia told me.
If it's from 1995, I wonder then if this screensaver is actually a 16-bit one. Depends on when it came out in the year, I imagine.

After Dark was cool so was Second Nature Screen Saver I check all my old shareware cd discs
you may want look here www.window95.com
One of the oldset site that still a round that may still have it is www.winsite.com which now oldest shareware hosting which used go to www.simtel.net then there www.jumbo.com
One of the cools was www.tucows.com but it RIP ow which used be call The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software.
Sure do miss the days of BBS and FTP hunting
When come to OS/2 Warp well there this www.os2bbs.com

MrKsoft wrote:

If it's from 1995, I wonder then if this screensaver is actually a 16-bit one. Depends on when it came out in the year, I imagine.

I remember it being 32-bit and having the same Win95 password protection as the other savers (i'd never use a 16-bit saver as they suck for security)

MrKsoft wrote on 2011-08-08, 19:58:

A strange request, perhaps, but that's what I do best. […]
Show full quote

A strange request, perhaps, but that's what I do best.

Back around 2002/2003, when I was in elementary school, I would visit a friend's house. In a back room where we usually hung out his family's old PC sat around. It was some sort of full-tower Gateway, which I believed looked a lot like this one that I own-- or perhaps was the exact same model. Anyway, it was like that one, and about the same age so manufactured circa 1996/7. It ran Windows 95, I remember it being in 256 colors with the Brick window theme applied, and it had most likely a Sound Blaster 16 in it since I distinctly remember MIDI playback on it using OPL3 instruments. We used to play some downloaded Win95 games off floppy disks on it late at night. It probably had somewhere between a Pentium 100 and 166 and 16MB of RAM, since I know we also played RollerCoaster Tycoon on it without any issues although it wasn't as snappy as on my Pentium II at home.

Anyway, when it wasn't in use, it ran this screen saver. It would start with a solid white screen, and would slowly draw different scenes as if they were being drawn by a mouse (they probably were and scripted to be played back as a screen saver). It would probably take about 3-5 minutes for each image to draw, and then it would sit with the image for a while and then start a new one. There were a lot of scenes and I don't know if I ever saw them all. Some that I remember include various still lifes, an island with little palm trees and a volcano, and a man playing a saxophone. They had a sort of paintlike quality to how they were drawn.

Sometimes I'd stay there late and just sleep there, and would end up watching the screen saver for a long time before actually sleeping. It was probably the most relaxing screen saver I've ever watched. Unfortunately, without a name or anything, I am completely unable to locate it. I've tried Google with various keywords describing it, but it's rather impossible: most Google results for screensavers are tainted with malicious sites, and when I find something legit it's a modern screensaver that isn't even what I meant (for example, something that doesn't draw an image at all but just instantly filters an existing one to look painted)

This would be the last step in being able to recreate the computing experience from back then, which I found overall extremely comforting despite it not being my own personal machine. Something felt very homely about the whole setup. Unfortunately, my friend and I had a falling-out years ago and he has since moved away, so I can't really go and ask about this. And it's very likely the machine has been tossed out since, so I have very little to go on. Anyone have any thoughts? I know it's a strange thing to try finding, and probably impossible to find on a blind search, so I'm posting in hopes that somebody else had this screen saver so I can hunt it down.

https://youtu.be/eenBquy4jJ8

That's one heckuva bump. What brings you here today, sir?

amvanoni@gmail.com wrote on 2020-08-02, 22:26:

https://youtu.be/eenBquy4jJ8

Does this have the man with the saxophone? That pic in particular was very distinctive.

Createacard was also mentioned in the OP's reddit thread.

So doing a search for
picture painter screensaver
on youtube shows that there were many different themed picture painter screensavers.

Jorpho wrote on 2020-08-02, 22:39:

Does this have the man with the saxophone? That pic in particular was very distinctive.

It doesn't.

However... Screen Gallery (part of Hallmark Card Studio ~1995) does. A P100 would definitely be in the right time for this as an OEM pack-in.

Not quite the image I recall, but then my memory could be playing tricks on me.

Where did you find that pic?

I don't know if anyone is still on this, but I've been looking for this same exact thing forever.

It looks like someone posted a video of it recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8oGk575ffA&t=359s

It was a screensaver from Hallmark Card Studio (1995)

I hope this ends the search!