Best drawing styles

15405 duels later, manga is still #1 in the XP Pen ranking, with sketch / pencil close behind.

The top three styles cluster tightly, but a sharp divide emerges lower down. Surrealist art, ranked 4th with 1270 ELO points, holds a 78-point lead over street art / graffiti in 5th place, the widest gap in the ranking. Manga's dominance at the summit is clear: it wins 69% of its duels and pulls 42 points ahead of sketch / pencil. Watercolor rounds out the podium with 1272 points, just 11 behind the runner-up. At the opposite end, pop art lingers in 10th place with 1078 ELO points, trailed closely by minimalist at 1095 and cartoon at 1106. The clustering at the bottom suggests a group of styles that struggle to capture the community's favor, even as the top half shows more defined preferences.

The ranking draws on 15405 duels submitted by 1098 players across 10 contenders, updated on 10 October 2026. The tight margins between watercolor and surrealist, separated by only 2 points, hint at how quickly the standings can shift with fresh votes. Head to the XP Pen TopList to cast your own duels and shape the order.

Updated on October 10, 2026

How this ranking is computed

Every duel won lifts a contender and every loss drops them, by an amount that depends on the opponent's strength: beating the leader is worth more than beating the last. It is an ELO, the same principle as in chess. Duels are not drawn at random — an adaptive entropy sort puts the least predictable match-ups first, which settles the ranking far faster than a full round robin. A worldwide ranking is only published past 30 completed plays. Known limit: a contender who has faced few opponents keeps an approximate score, and the bottom of the table moves more than the podium.

How our rankings are made →