It takes a whole team of painters, an orchestra of machines and paint spray, what seems like miles of tape and paper, and oh so much work (not to mention the planning process) in order to paint an entire plane. Southwest Airlines shows some of its detailed plane paintings in the videos below (the Missouri One and Colorado One) along with their more basic painting efforts.
The plane in the GIF above was painted in 10 days, you can see every step of the process. There are so many layers of colors it’s crazy.