The best laptops for drawing: make beautiful art with these delightful devices

The best laptops for drawing and sketching all have touchscreens which can be used with a stylus. This adds up to a surprisingly natural and intuitive art experience. But which one should you choose?

To answer that question, we’ve asked our experts to road-test a range of the best devices, to pick out the very best laptops for drawing. They’ve both tested them scientifically, by running standard benchmark tests, as well as actually drawing on each device using different software, to find out what they’re like to use in practice. And they’ve paid particular attention to the colour accuracy, resolution and responsiveness of the screens.

Best overall

1. Surface Laptop Studio 2

Best budget

2. Acer Chromebook Spin 514

Most portable

Best performance

4. Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra

Best screen

5. ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED (UX3405)

Best 2-in-1

6. HP Spectre x360 14 (2024)

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Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

The best budget laptop for drawing

Specifications

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3500U processor quad-core 3.7 GHz

Graphics: AMD Radeon Graphics shared memory

RAM: 8 GB

Screen: 35.6 cm (14″) Full HD (1920 x 1080) 16:9 Touchscree

Storage: 128 GB Flash Memory

Reasons to buy

Fast and reliable performance

Large 14-inch FHD touchscreen

Sturdy aluminium frame

Reasons to avoid

–

Flash memory rather than SSD

–

A great tablet-laptop combo for portable digital drawing

Specifications

CPU: Up to 12th Gen Intel® Core i7-1265U

Graphics: Intel Iris Xe Graphics

RAM: Up to 32GB LPDDR5

Screen: 13-inch 3:2 PixelSense Flow Display

Storage: Up to 1TB

Reasons to buy

Excellent design and quality

Runs full software

Works with old accessories

Beautiful screen and keyboard

Reasons to avoid

–

Small folders and tabs

–

SQ3 model is poor

Yes, strictly speaking, the Surface Pro 9 is a tablet rather than a laptop, albeit one that runs Windows 11, allowing you to use fully fledged desktop software on a compact device. However, attach the optional Type Cover keyboard, and you’ve basically got a fantastic thin and light laptop. Of course an iPad can also do this, but we haven’t included iPads in this guide since they don’t run desktop software.

We found Windows 11 to run fast, and the screen offers an excellent drawing experience with the Surface Slim Pen 2. The design works well. We recommend the optional keyboard since we find Windows awkward to use using touch alone, but whether you go for the Type Cover or not, the solid stand provides adequate support to hold the device upright when drawing at a desk, while you also have the benefit of being able to use this handheld and draw on your lap.

A truly gorgeous OLED screen that’s great for drawing

Specifications

CPU: Intel Core Ultra i9-185H Processor 2.3 GHz (24MB Cache, up to 5.1 GHz, 16 cores, 22 Threads)

Graphics: Intel Arc Graphics

RAM: 32GB LPDDR5X

Screen: 14-inch, 3K (2880 x 1800) OLED 16:10, 100% DCI-P3, touchscreen

Storage: 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD

Reasons to buy

OLED screen even better, somehow

AI neural processor boosts performance

Undercuts MacBook Air on price

Reasons to avoid

–

Graphics performance could be better

–

Not enough ports

This 14-inch 3K OLED touchscreen display offers a 120Hz refresh rate and excellent colour accuracy. Artists can also benefit from a 100% sRGB colour gamut, 1.07 billion colours on display; response time of 0.2ms, and while the brightness is just 500 nits, the OLED tech makes it feel much brighter and sharper than that in reality. In the words of our reviewer, “It’s the finest laptop screen on sale right now, and it worked perfectly throughout my testing”.

All this comes in a thin and light package, weighing only 1.28kg and measuring 1.49cm thick. Our reviewer also liked smaller but no less important features like a virtual numpad on the trackpad and ASUS Pencil 2 stylus support. And while it’s let down by limited port selection (2 Thunderbolt 4 ports, 1 USB-A, and HDMI), it’s competitively priced, undercutting similarly specced MacBook Air models. In short, this is an excellent choice for digital drawing.

In our tests, both screens performed well, displaying 97% of sRGB, 73% of Adobe RGB and 72% of the P3 colour gamuts. They hit 395 nits of brightness at 100%, and provided all the sharpness and saturation you expect from OLED.

But perhaps more importantly than technical benchmarking, we evaluate machines in real-world situations, pushing them to the limit with multiple applications running to see how they perform in real project-like conditions. Power, speed, portability, and what a laptop looks and feels like are all criteria in our reviewing process.In addition, every laptop we recommend for drawing has to have a good screen that’s comfortable to work on for extended periods.

Why should I use a touchscreen laptop for drawing?

Generally speaking, when it comes to digital drawing, your options are using a graphics tablet with a laptop or PC, a tablet with a stylus or pen display, or a touchscreen laptop. Some artists may prefer the feeling of graphics tablets, but the technology isn’t perfect, and the need to coordinate your hand separately from your screen can be disruptive when you’re in the flow of things. They’re not as portable as all-in-one devices. They are, however, very affordable, and purpose-built to deliver precision.

The best tablets and pen displays with a stylus are generally the easiest devices for drawing, and are supremely portable – but they can get pretty pricey if you want something durable and robust, and they often lack the versatility to serve for functions other than drawing.

Touch screen laptops, on the other hand, are easily the most versatile for their price point when you consider the functionality they offer.

Do I need a hybrid laptop for drawing?

No, you don’t need a hybrid laptop for drawing, but it can certainly help. Also known as 2-in-1 laptops, these devices are growing in popularity thanks to how versatile they can be. And with touchscreen technology improving year on year, you’ll be hard-pressed to find such flexibility at such a low price point in any other kind of device.

Generally the ability to switch the laptop to tablet mode, getting the keyboard out of the way, provides better support and lets you draw in more situations. Take a look at our guide to the best 2-in-1 laptops for creatives for more details.

What are the cons of using a hybrid laptop for drawing?

There are, of course, cons to hybrid laptops. Although software is becoming more accessible and popular for drawing, you won’t get the same experience as you would on a pen display or tablet. If you specifically want a laptop for drawing, hybrid laptops are generally the way to go, though. Drawing on a regular touchscreen laptop can be a little awkward and uncomfortable due to the obstructive lower half of clamshell, and many laptop screens will move slightly under pen pressure if they don’t have the support of an easel mount.

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