[Matplotlib-users] Access to color cycle?

Hi,

I am making a stacked histogram where one must enter the desired colors
together in a list/array when the histogram is called.  For certain objects
in my code, it's helpful to assign a color to them, so that they are
immediately identified across various plots.  Therefore, I essentially want
to take the color cycle, swap out a few entries for which colors have been
assigned by the user, and otherwise keep the cycle in tact.  For example,
if the first object is to be orange, but no other colors are assigned, I
want something like:

colors= ['orange', default_cycle[1::]]

However, according to some threads, the only way to access the color cycle
that I'm aware of is through a generator stored in:

axes._get_lines.color_cycle()

I don't like this approach because iterating through the color cycle will
cause the next plot to start at a different point in the cycle.  I'm sure I
can hack something up that gets around this, but there seems to be a
canonical way to just list all of the default colors in a list once and be
done with it.  Is this the case?

Thanks.