matplotlib Plotting Cookbook

Using custom colors for boxplots

Boxplots are common staple features of scientific publications. Colored boxplots are no trouble; however, you may need to use black and white only. In this recipe, we are going to see how to use custom colors with boxplots.

How to do it...

Every function that creates a specific figure returns some values—they are the low-level drawing primitives that constitute the figure. Most of the time, we don't bother to get those return values. However, manipulating those low-level drawing primitives allows some fine-tuning, such as custom color schemes for a box plot.

Making a boxplot appear totally black is a little bit trickier than it should be, as shown in the following script:

import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot ...