I have used an low-power ESP8266 together with a native drawing library for this use case. As getting the drawing perfect is quite cumbersome i have mocked the graphics library in javascript using the canvas api [1].

The syntax is so similar that you can mostly copy and paste the drawing code between js and the arduino project with only a few adjustments. This has the huge advantage that you can use modern JS dev tools including livereload to get the drawing right while still ending up with native code.

[1] https://www.godberit.de/2019/11/08/Mock-for-ESP8266-graphics...