Three weeks ago, a clip of Bad Bunny smearing cobalt blue acrylic across a canvas backstage in Chicago racked up 41 million views.
By the weekend, Sabrina Carpenter had posted a time-lapse of herself painting tiny daisies on a denim jacket.
Then Charli XCX showed up to a London afterparty with actual paint on her hands, and the internet collectively lost its mind.
Welcome to the strangest celebrity trend of the year: famous people are painting, badly and proudly, and fans cannot stop watching.
According to Google Trends, searches for "beginner acrylic painting" have more than doubled since March.
Michaels told analysts this week that canvas sales are up 28 percent year over year, a spike the company directly credited to social media.
On TikTok, the hashtag #celebritypaintnight has pulled in over 900 million views, with fans recreating their favorite stars' chaotic brushstrokes.
Tours are grueling, press cycles are endless, and phones are everywhere.
Painting offers something rare for celebrities in 2025: a genuinely unpolished hobby with no algorithm to game.
It also photographs beautifully, which certainly doesn't hurt.
The fan discourse, naturally, has gotten messy.
When Olivia Rodrigo posted a moody oil portrait that fans quickly identified as resembling her ex, the replies turned into a full forensic investigation.
When Drake showed off a massive abstract piece in his Toronto mansion, critics called it a "very expensive toddler project." His fans fired back that at least he's making something instead of just buying it.
A Los Angeles dealer told me this week that three separate pop stars have quietly inquired about showing work, though none have committed. "They're terrified of being laughed at," she said. "Which is exactly why people find it charming." There's also real money moving.
A limited run of prints from a mystery musician's painting series sold out in eleven minutes last month, reselling for four figures on eBay.
Meanwhile, paint-and-sip studios in Nashville and Austin report waitlists for the first time since 2019, packed with fans hoping to bump into someone famous working on their brush technique.
Some critics argue this is just the latest rebrand in a long line of celebrity side quests, following the candle era and the sourdough era.
A viral essay this week argued that painting is simply the most photogenic way to seem deep without saying anything at all.
What's clear is that the trend has legs beyond A-listers.
Teachers say students are asking for art electives again.
Craft stores are struggling to keep certain colors in stock.
And somewhere out there, a very confused art school professor is watching enrollment climb for reasons nobody could have predicted.
The whole thing will probably fade, the way most internet obsessions do.
But for now, the canvas is winning, and the group chat is full of half-finished sunsets. **Our take:** There's something genuinely refreshing about watching people with unlimited resources choose a hobby they're objectively mediocre at.
Painting is messy, slow, and impossible to fake, which is precisely why it's resonating in an era of perfectly curated everything.
Final Thoughts
If this trend gets a few million people to pick up a brush, that's a win, even if the celebrity paintings themselves belong in a garage.