Every day a few dozen topics jump up Google Trends. Most are match results and celebrity news, and none of that belongs on a wall. Some days, though, the list has something you could actually paint: a sky event, a seasonal ritual, a sport people are suddenly curious about. Trending Walls picks four of those each day and treats each one as a brief. You have a free wall this weekend. What goes on it, and how?
The pictures in this edition are AI-generated wall concepts, not photos of real murals. Treat them as sketches for your own piece. Don't go looking for the walls.
Aurora borealis
Searches for the aurora borealis climbed on October 7. It's a forgiving subject, because the sky does most of the composition for you.
You need a near-black navy for the sky, a cool spring green, a fluorescent green for the brightest edges, a soft violet and plain black for the trees. This piece is about fades, not outlines. Lay the navy first and let it dry. Then pull the green in long vertical strokes from about 30 cm away, so the edges stay soft. Go back over the brightest band with fluorescent green from 10 to 15 cm. Leave the bottom of each curtain ragged. A real aurora fades out downward, and a clean lower edge looks fake straight away. Violet goes only at the top of the curtains.
The forest is what turns colour into sky. A row of flat black spruce silhouettes along the bottom gives a horizon and a sense of scale, and a thin cap helps with the tips. Last, flick a few white stars from a nearly empty can held at an angle.
The Moon and Jupiter
People were searching for the Moon and Jupiter together today, which usually means the two are sitting close in the evening sky.
The palette is deep indigo, a lighter twilight blue for the lower sky, warm grey and off-white for the Moon, and cream, tan and rust for Jupiter. What makes this one work is the size difference. Let the crescent Moon take up a third of the wall and keep Jupiter small but detailed. Paint the crescent in off-white over the indigo, then mist a little indigo over the inner edge so it curves away instead of stopping dead. Craters are small warm-grey circles with a thin white rim on one side.
Jupiter is where most people go wrong. It has no visible rings in a sky like this. Add them and you've painted Saturn. Start with a plain ball, run horizontal bands of cream, tan and rust across it, and put a small rust-red oval low on one side for the Great Red Spot. Long walls suit this subject. An underpass is ideal, since people walk past slowly and the sky has room to stretch.
A Halloween pumpkin
It's October, so pumpkin searches are climbing, as they do every year before Halloween.
Go for a strong orange skin, burnt orange for the ribs, yellow and pale cream for the glow, a muted green stem and a purple night behind it. A carved pumpkin is a light source, so paint the light before the shapes. Start the eyes and mouth as bright yellow, add a cream centre, then frame them with burnt orange so they look cut into the skin. Mist a little orange around the openings. That spill of light sells the glow better than any detail on the face. Darker ribs running from stem to base give it volume for very little effort.
Keep the face on the friendly side, more grin than horror. Small black bats in the purple sky and a few loose leaves at the base place it in the season. Garage doors and roller shutters are good surfaces for seasonal pieces, since owners tend to agree more easily to something that stays up for a few weeks.
Pickleball
Pickleball keeps turning up in the trends as more people take it up on weekends, and it was back again today.
This one is the opposite of the aurora: flat colour and hard edges. Teal and coral for the paddles, bright yellow for the ball, court blue behind, white for the lines. Block in the two crossed paddles first, and check the shape before you outline. Pickleball paddles have long rectangular faces with rounded corners and no strings. Make them round and everyone reads table tennis. Outline in black with a skinny cap, then run one white highlight along the top edge of each paddle.
The holes make the ball. Paint a yellow circle, then add small dark holes in a loose grid, shrinking them toward the edges so the ball looks round rather than flat. A few curved yellow and white motion lines behind it give you speed. Paint it on a wall beside a real court or on a park pavilion and the piece explains itself.
Painting a trend responsibly
A trend is a good excuse to paint. It doesn't change where you're allowed to. Every wall in these concepts, a house gable, an underpass, a garage door, needs either a legal wall or the owner's written permission. If you're not sure where to start, our guide to finding legal graffiti spots explains how to find and check a wall before you bring a single can.
Leave logos, brand names and real people out of trend pieces, even when a person or a product is what's trending. And photograph the finished wall in daylight, once straight on and once from an angle. The aurora in particular looks like a different piece under a street lamp.