Color Demo

Matplotlib recognizes the following formats to specify a color:

1. an RGB or RGBA tuple of float values in [0, 1] (e.g. (0.1, 0.2, 0.5) or (0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 0.3)). RGBA is short for Red, Green, Blue, Alpha;
2. a hex RGB or RGBA string (e.g., '#0F0F0F' or '#0F0F0F0F');
3. a shorthand hex RGB or RGBA string, equivalent to the hex RGB or RGBA string obtained by duplicating each character, (e.g., '#abc', equivalent to '#aabbcc', or '#abcd', equivalent to '#aabbccdd');
4. a string representation of a float value in [0, 1] inclusive for gray level (e.g., '0.5');
5. a single letter string, i.e. one of {'b', 'g', 'r', 'c', 'm', 'y', 'k', 'w'}, which are short-hand notations for shades of blue, green, red, cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and white;
6. a X11/CSS4 ("html") color name, e.g. "blue";
7. a name from the xkcd color survey, prefixed with 'xkcd:' (e.g., 'xkcd:sky blue');
8. a "Cn" color spec, i.e. 'C' followed by a number, which is an index into the default property cycle (rcParams["axes.prop_cycle"] (default: cycler('color', ['#1f77b4', '#ff7f0e', '#2ca02c', '#d62728', '#9467bd', '#8c564b', '#e377c2', '#7f7f7f', '#bcbd22', '#17becf']))); the indexing is intended to occur at rendering time, and defaults to black if the cycle does not include color.
9. one of {'tab:blue', 'tab:orange', 'tab:green', 'tab:red', 'tab:purple', 'tab:brown', 'tab:pink', 'tab:gray', 'tab:olive', 'tab:cyan'} which are the Tableau Colors from the 'tab10' categorical palette (which is the default color cycle);

For more information on colors in matplotlib see

• the Specifying Colors tutorial;
• the matplotlib.colors API;
• the List of named colors example.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

t = np.linspace(0.0, 2.0, 201)
s = np.sin(2 * np.pi * t)

# 1) RGB tuple:
fig, ax = plt.subplots(facecolor=(.18, .31, .31))
# 2) hex string:
ax.set_facecolor('#eafff5')
# 3) gray level string:
ax.set_title('Voltage vs. time chart', color='0.7')
# 4) single letter color string
ax.set_xlabel('time (s)', color='c')
# 5) a named color:
ax.set_ylabel('voltage (mV)', color='peachpuff')
# 6) a named xkcd color:
ax.plot(t, s, 'xkcd:crimson')
# 7) Cn notation:
ax.plot(t, .7*s, color='C4', linestyle='--')
# 8) tab notation:
ax.tick_params(labelcolor='tab:orange')


plt.show()

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References

The use of the following functions, methods, classes and modules is shown in this example:

import matplotlib
matplotlib.colors
matplotlib.axes.Axes.plot
matplotlib.axes.Axes.set_facecolor
matplotlib.axes.Axes.set_title
matplotlib.axes.Axes.set_xlabel
matplotlib.axes.Axes.set_ylabel
matplotlib.axes.Axes.tick_params

Out:

<function _AxesBase.tick_params at 0x7f73be8ded30>