A picture is worth a thousand words, and with Python’s matplotlib library, it

fortunately takes far less than a thousand words of code to create a

production-quality graphic.

However, matplotlib is also a massive library, and getting a plot to look just
right is often achieved through trial and error. Using one-liners to generate
basic plots in matplotlib is fairly simple, but skillfully commanding the
remaining 98% of the library can be daunting.

This article is a beginner-to-intermediate-level walkthrough on matplotlib

that mixes theory with examples. While learning by example can be
tremendously insightful, it helps to have even just a surface-level
understanding of the library’s inner workings and layout as well.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

 Pylab and pyplot: which is which?

 Key concepts of matplotlib’s design
 Understanding plt.subplots()
 Visualizing arrays with matplotlib
 Plotting with the pandas + matplotlib combination

This article assumes the user knows a tiny bit of NumPy. We’ll mainly use
the numpy.randommodule to generate “toy” data, drawing samples from
different statistical distributions.

If you don’t already have matplotlib installed, see here for a walkthrough
before proceeding.

Why Can Matplotlib Be Confusing?

Learning matplotlib can be a frustrating process at times. The problem is not
that matplotlib’s documentation is lacking: the documentation is actually
extensive. But the following issues can cause some challenges:

 The library itself is huge, at something like 70,000 total lines of code.
 Matplotlib is home to several different interfaces (ways of constructing
a figure) and capable of interacting with a handful of different backends.
(Backends deal with the process of how charts are actually rendered,
not just structured internally.)
 While it is comprehensive, some of matplotlib’s own public
documentation is seriously out-of-date. The library is still evolving, and
many older examples floating around online may take 70% fewer lines
of code in their modern version.
So, before we get to any glitzy examples, it’s useful to grasp the core concepts
of matplotlib’s design.

Pylab: What Is It, and Should I Use It?

Let’s start with a bit of history: John D. Hunter, a neurobiologist, began
developing matplotlib around 2003, originally inspired to emulate commands
from Mathworks’ MATLAB software. John passed away tragically young at age
44, in 2012, and matplotlib is now a full-fledged community effort, developed
and maintained by a host of others. (John gave a talkabout the evolution of
matplotlib at the 2012 SciPy conference, which is worth a watch.)

One relevant feature of MATLAB is its global style. The Python concept of
importing is not heavily used in MATLAB, and most of MATLAB’s functions are
readily available to the user at the top level.

Knowing that matplotlib has its roots in MATLAB helps to explain why pylab
exists. pylab is a module within the matplotlib library that was built to mimic
MATLAB’s global style. It exists only to bring a number of functions and
classes from both NumPy and matplotlib into the namespace, making for an
easy transition for former MATLAB users who were not used to
needing import statements.

Ex-MATLAB converts (who are all fine people, I promise!) liked this
functionality, because with from pylab import *, they could simply
call plot() or array() directly, as they would in MATLAB.

The issue here may be apparent to some Python users: using from pylab
import * in a session or script is generally bad practice. Matplotlib now
directly advises against this in its own tutorials:

“[pylab] still exists for historical reasons, but it is highly advised not to use. It
pollutes namespaces with functions that will shadow Python built-ins and can
lead to hard-to-track bugs. To get IPython integration without imports the use
of the %matplotlibmagic is preferred.” [Source]
Internally, there are a ton of potentially conflicting imports being masked
within the short pylab source. In fact, using ipython --pylab (from the
terminal/command line) or %pylab(from IPython/Jupyter tools) simply
calls from pylab import * under the hood.

The bottom line is that matplotlib has abandoned this convenience module and
now explicitly recommends against using pylab, bringing things more in line
with one of Python’s key notions: explicit is better than implicit.
Without the need for pylab, we can usually get away with just one canonical
import:

>>>
>>> import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
While we’re at it, let’s also import NumPy, which we’ll use for generating data
later on, and call np.random.seed() to make examples with (pseudo)random
data reproducible:

>>>
>>> import numpy as np
>>> np.random.seed(444)

The Matplotlib Object Hierarchy

One important big-picture matplotlib concept is its object hierarchy.

If you’ve worked through any introductory matplotlib tutorial, you’ve

probably called something like plt.plot([1, 2, 3]). This one-liner hides the
fact that a plot is really a hierarchy of nested Python objects. A “hierarchy”
here means that there is a tree-like structure of matplotlib objects underlying
each plot.

A Figure object is the outermost container for a matplotlib graphic, which can
contain multiple Axes objects. One source of confusion is the name:
an Axes actually translates into what we think of as an individual plot or graph
(rather than the plural of “axis,” as we might expect).

You can think of the Figure object as a box-like container holding one or
more Axes (actual plots). Below the Axes in the hierarchy are smaller objects
such as tick marks, individual lines, legends, and text boxes. Almost every
“element” of a chart is its own manipulable Python object, all the way down to
the ticks and labels:
Here’s an illustration of this hierarchy in action. Don’t worry if you’re not
completely familiar with this notation, which we’ll cover later on:

>>>
>>> fig, _ = plt.subplots()
>>> type(fig)
<class 'matplotlib.figure.Figure'>
Above, we created two variables with plt.subplots(). The first is a top-
level Figure object. The second is a “throwaway” variable that we don’t need
just yet, denoted with an underscore. Using attribute notation, it is easy to
traverse down the figure hierarchy and see the first tick of the y axis of the
first Axes object:

>>>
>>> one_tick = fig.axes[0].yaxis.get_major_ticks()[0]
>>> type(one_tick)
<class 'matplotlib.axis.YTick'>
Above, fig (a Figure class instance) has multiple Axes (a list, for which we take
the first element). Each Axes has a yaxis and xaxis, each of which have a
collection of “major ticks,” and we grab the first one.

Matplotlib presents this as a figure anatomy, rather than an explicit hierarchy:

(In true matplotlib style, the figure above is created in the matplotlib
docs here.)

Stateful Versus Stateless Approaches

Alright, we need one more chunk of theory before we can get around to the
shiny visualizations: the difference between the stateful (state-based, state-
machine) and stateless (object-oriented, OO) interfaces.

Above, we used import matplotlib.pyplot as plt to import the pyplot module

from matplotlib and name it plt.

Almost all functions from pyplot, such as plt.plot(), are implicitly either
referring to an existing current Figure and current Axes, or creating them
anew if none exist. Hidden in the matplotlib docs is this helpful snippet:

“[With pyplot], simple functions are used to add plot elements (lines, images,
text, etc.) to the current axes in the current figure.” [emphasis added]
Hardcore ex-MATLAB users may choose to word this by saying something
like, “plt.plot() is a state-machine interface that implicitly tracks the current
figure!” In English, this means that:

 The stateful interface makes its calls with plt.plot() and other top-level
pyplot functions. There is only ever one Figure or Axes that you’re
manipulating at a given time, and you don’t need to explicitly refer to it.
 Modifying the underlying objects directly is the object-oriented
approach. We usually do this by calling methods of an Axes object, which
is the object that represents a plot itself.

The flow of this process, at a high level, looks like this:

Tying these together, most of the functions from pyplot also exist as methods
of the matplotlib.axes.Axes class.

This is easier to see by peeking under the hood. plt.plot() can be boiled down
to five or so lines of code:

>>>
# matplotlib/pyplot.py
>>> def plot(*args, **kwargs):
... """An abridged version of plt.plot()."""
... ax = plt.gca()
... return ax.plot(*args, **kwargs)

>>> def gca(**kwargs):

... """Get the current Axes of the current Figure."""
... return plt.gcf().gca(**kwargs)
Calling plt.plot() is just a convenient way to get the current Axes of the
current Figure and then call its plot() method. This is what is meant by the
assertion that the stateful interface always “implicitly tracks” the plot that it
wants to reference.

pyplot is home to a batch of functions that are really just wrappers around
matplotlib’s object-oriented interface. For example, with plt.title(), there
are corresponding setter and getter methods within the OO
approach, ax.set_title() and ax.get_title(). (Use of getters and setters tends
to be more popular in languages such as Java but is a key feature of
matplotlib’s OO approach.)

Calling plt.title() gets translated into this one line: gca().set_title(s,

*args, **kwargs). Here’s what that is doing:

 gca() grabs the current axis and returns it.

 set_title() is a setter method that sets the title for that Axes object. The
“convenience” here is that we didn’t need to specify any Axes object
explicitly with plt.title().

Similarly, if you take a few moments to look at the source for top-level
functions like plt.grid(), plt.legend(), and plt.ylabels(), you’ll notice that all
of them follow the same structure of delegating to the current Axes
with gca() and then calling some method of the current Axes. (This is the
underlying object-oriented approach!)

Understanding plt.subplots() Notation

Alright, enough theory. Now, we’re ready to tie everything together and do
some plotting. From here on out, we’ll mostly rely on the stateless (object-
oriented) approach, which is more customizable and comes in handy as
graphs become more complex.

The prescribed way to create a Figure with a single Axes under the OO
approach is (not too intuitively) with plt.subplots(). This is really the only
time that the OO approach uses pyplot, to create a Figure and Axes:

>>>
>>> fig, ax = plt.subplots()
Above, we took advantage of iterable unpacking to assign a separate variable
to each of the two results of plt.subplots(). Notice that we didn’t pass
arguments to subplots() here. The default call is subplots(nrows=1, ncols=1).
Consequently, ax is a single AxesSubplot object:

>>>
>>> type(ax)
<class 'matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot'>
We can call its instance methods to manipulate the plot similarly to how we
call pyplots functions. Let’s illustrate with a stacked area graph of three time
series:

>>>
>>> rng = np.arange(50)
>>> rnd = np.random.randint(0, 10, size=(3, rng.size))
>>> yrs = 1950 + rng

>>> fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(5, 3))

>>> ax.stackplot(yrs, rng + rnd, labels=['Eastasia', 'Eurasia',
'Oceania'])
>>> ax.set_title('Combined debt growth over time')
>>> ax.legend(loc='upper left')
>>> ax.set_ylabel('Total debt')
>>> ax.set_xlim(xmin=yrs[0], xmax=yrs[-1])
>>> fig.tight_layout()
Here’s what’s going on above:

 After creating three random time series, we defined one Figure (fig)
containing one Axes (a plot, ax).
 We call methods of ax directly to create a stacked area chart and to add
a legend, title, and y-axis label. Under the object-oriented approach, it’s
clear that all of these are attributes of ax.
 tight_layout() applies to the Figure object as a whole to clean up
whitespace padding.

Let’s look at an example with multiple subplots (Axes) within one Figure,
plotting two correlated arrays that are drawn from the discrete uniform
distribution:

>>>
>>> x = np.random.randint(low=1, high=11, size=50)
>>> y = x + np.random.randint(1, 5, size=x.size)
>>> data = np.column_stack((x, y))

>>> fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(nrows=1, ncols=2,

... figsize=(8, 4))

>>> ax1.scatter(x=x, y=y, marker='o', c='r', edgecolor='b')

>>> ax1.set_title('Scatter: $x$ versus $y$')
>>> ax1.set_xlabel('$x$')
>>> ax1.set_ylabel('$y$')

>>> ax2.hist(data, bins=np.arange(data.min(), data.max()),

... label=('x', 'y'))
>>> ax2.legend(loc=(0.65, 0.8))
>>> ax2.set_title('Frequencies of $x$ and $y$')
>>> ax2.yaxis.tick_right()

There’s a little bit more going on in this example:

 Because we’re creating a “1x2” Figure, the returned result

of plt.subplots(1, 2) is now a Figure object and a NumPy array of Axes
objects. (You can inspect this with fig, axs = plt.subplots(1, 2) and
taking a look at axs.)
 We deal with ax1 and ax2 individually, which would be difficult to do
with the stateful approach. The final line is a good illustration of the
object hierarchy, where we are modifying the yaxis belonging to the
second Axes, placing its ticks and ticklabels to the right.
 Text inside dollar signs utilizes TeX markup to put variables in italics.
Remember that multiple Axes can be enclosed in or “belong to” a given figure.
In the case above, fig.axes gets us a list of all the Axes objects:

>>>
>>> (fig.axes[0] is ax1, fig.axes[1] is ax2)
(True, True)
(fig.axes is lowercase, not uppercase. There’s no denying the terminology is a
bit confusing.)

Taking this one step further, we could alternatively create a figure that holds a
2x2 grid of Axes objects:

>>>
>>> fig, ax = plt.subplots(nrows=2, ncols=2, figsize=(7, 7))
Now, what is ax? It’s no longer a single Axes, but a two-dimensional NumPy
array of them:

>>>
>>> type(ax)
numpy.ndarray

>>> ax
array([[<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot object at 0x1106daf98>,
<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot object at 0x113045c88>],
[<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot object at 0x11d573cf8>,
<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot object at 0x1130117f0>]],
dtype=object)

>>> ax.shape
(2, 2)
This is reaffirmed by the docstring:

“ax can be either a single matplotlib.axes.Axes object or an array

of Axes objects if more than one subplot was created.”
We now need to call plotting methods on each of these Axes (but not the
NumPy array, which is just a container in this case). A common way to
address this is to use iterable unpacking after flattening the array to be one-
dimensional:

>>>
>>> fig, ax = plt.subplots(nrows=2, ncols=2, figsize=(7, 7))
>>> ax1, ax2, ax3, ax4 = ax.flatten() # flatten a 2d NumPy array to 1d
We could’ve also done this with ((ax1, ax2), (ax3, ax4)) = ax, but the first
approach tends to be more flexible.

To illustrate some more advanced subplot features, let’s pull some

macroeconomic California housing data extracted from a compressed tar
archive, using io, tarfile, and urllib from Python’s Standard Library.

>>>
>>> from io import BytesIO
>>> import tarfile
>>> from urllib.request import urlopen

>>> url = 'http://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/~ltorgo/Regression/cal_housing.tgz'

>>> b = BytesIO(urlopen(url).read())
>>> fpath = 'CaliforniaHousing/cal_housing.data'

>>> with tarfile.open(mode='r', fileobj=b) as archive:

... housing = np.loadtxt(archive.extractfile(fpath), delimiter=',')
The “response” variable y below, to use the statistical term, is an area’s
average home value. pop and age are the area’s population and average house
age, respectively:

>>>
>>> y = housing[:, -1]
>>> pop, age = housing[:, [4, 7]].T
Next let’s define a “helper function” that places a text box inside of a plot and
acts as an “in-plot title”:

>>>
>>> def add_titlebox(ax, text):
... ax.text(.55, .8, text,
... horizontalalignment='center',
... transform=ax.transAxes,
... bbox=dict(facecolor='white', alpha=0.6),
... fontsize=12.5)
... return ax
We’re ready to do some plotting. Matplotlib’s gridspec module allows for more
subplot customization. pyplot’s subplot2grid() interacts with this module
nicely. Let’s say we want to create a layout like this:
Above, what we actually have is a 3x2 grid. ax1 is twice the height and width
of ax2/ax3, meaning that it takes up two columns and two rows.
The second argument to subplot2grid() is the (row, column) location of the
Axes within the grid:

>>>
>>> gridsize = (3, 2)
>>> fig = plt.figure(figsize=(12, 8))
>>> ax1 = plt.subplot2grid(gridsize, (0, 0), colspan=2, rowspan=2)
>>> ax2 = plt.subplot2grid(gridsize, (2, 0))
>>> ax3 = plt.subplot2grid(gridsize, (2, 1))
Now, we can proceed as normal, modifying each Axes individually:

>>>
>>> ax1.set_title('Home value as a function of home age & area
population',
... fontsize=14)
>>> sctr = ax1.scatter(x=age, y=pop, c=y, cmap='RdYlGn')
>>> plt.colorbar(sctr, ax=ax1, format='$%d')
>>> ax1.set_yscale('log')
>>> ax2.hist(age, bins='auto')
>>> ax3.hist(pop, bins='auto', log=True)

>>> add_titlebox(ax2, 'Histogram: home age')

>>> add_titlebox(ax3, 'Histogram: area population (log scl.)')
Above, colorbar() (different from ColorMap earlier) gets called on the Figure
directly, rather than the Axes. Its first argument uses
Matplotlib’s .scatter() and is the result of ax1.scatter(), which functions as a
mapping of y-values to a ColorMap.

Visually, there isn’t much differentiation in color (the y-variable) as we move

up and down the y-axis, indicating that home age seems to be a stronger
determinant of house value.

The “Figures” Behind The Scenes

Each time you call plt.subplots() or the less frequently
used plt.figure() (which creates a Figure, with no Axes), you are creating a
new Figure object that matplotlib sneakily keeps around in memory. Earlier,
we alluded to the concept of a current Figure and current Axes. By default,
these are the most recently created Figure and Axes, which we can show with
the built-in function id() to display the address of the object in memory:

>>>
>>> fig1, ax1 = plt.subplots()

>>> id(fig1)
4525567840

>>> id(plt.gcf()) # `fig1` is the current figure.

4525567840

>>> fig2, ax2 = plt.subplots()

>>> id(fig2) == id(plt.gcf()) # The current figure has changed to `fig2`.
True
(We could also use the built-in is operator here.)

After the above routine, the current figure is fig2, the most recently created
figure. However, both figures are still hanging around in memory, each with a
corresponding ID number (1-indexed, in MATLAB style):

>>>
>>> plt.get_fignums()
[1, 2]
A useful way to get all of the Figures themselves is with a mapping
of plt.figure() to each of these integers:
>>>
>>> def get_all_figures():
... return [plt.figure(i) for i in plt.get_fignums()]

>>> get_all_figures()
[<matplotlib.figure.Figure at 0x10dbeaf60>,
<matplotlib.figure.Figure at 0x1234cb6d8>]
Be cognizant of this if running a script where you’re creating a group of
figures. You’ll want to explicitly close each of them after use to avoid
a MemoryError. By itself, plt.close() closes the current
figure, plt.close(num) closes the figure number num,
and plt.close('all')closes all the figure windows:

>>>
>>> plt.close('all')
>>> get_all_figures()
[]

A Burst of Color: imshow() and matshow()

While ax.plot() is one of the most common plotting methods on an Axes,
there are a whole host of others, as well. (We used ax.stackplot() above. You
can find the complete list here.)

Methods that get heavy use are imshow() and matshow(), with the latter being a
wrapper around the former. These are useful anytime that a raw numerical
array can be visualized as a colored grid.

First, let’s create two distinct grids with some fancy NumPy indexing:

>>>
>>> x = np.diag(np.arange(2, 12))[::-1]
>>> x[np.diag_indices_from(x[::-1])] = np.arange(2, 12)
>>> x2 = np.arange(x.size).reshape(x.shape)
Next, we can map these to their image representations. In this specific case,
we toggle “off” all axis labels and ticks by using a dictionary comprehension
and passing the result to ax.tick_params():

>>>
>>> sides = ('left', 'right', 'top', 'bottom')
>>> nolabels = {s: False for s in sides}
>>> nolabels.update({'label%s' % s: False for s in sides})
>>> print(nolabels)
{'left': False, 'right': False, 'top': False, 'bottom': False,
'labelleft': False,
'labelright': False, 'labeltop': False, 'labelbottom': False}
Then, we can use a context manager to disable the grid, and call matshow() on
each Axes. Lastly, we need to put the colorbar in what is technically a new
Axes within fig. For this, we can use a bit of an esoteric function from deep
within matplotlib:

>>>
>>> from mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1.axes_divider import make_axes_locatable

>>> with plt.rc_context(rc={'axes.grid': False}):

... fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize=(8, 4))
... ax1.matshow(x)
... img2 = ax2.matshow(x2, cmap='RdYlGn_r')
... for ax in (ax1, ax2):
... ax.tick_params(axis='both', which='both', **nolabels)
... for i, j in zip(*x.nonzero()):
... ax1.text(j, i, x[i, j], color='white', ha='center',
va='center')
...
... divider = make_axes_locatable(ax2)
... cax = divider.append_axes("right", size='5%', pad=0)
... plt.colorbar(img2, cax=cax, ax=[ax1, ax2])
... fig.suptitle('Heatmaps with `Axes.matshow`', fontsize=16)
Plotting in Pandas
The pandas library has become popular for not just for enabling powerful data
analysis, but also for its handy pre-canned plotting methods. Interestingly
though, pandas plotting methods are really just convenient wrappers around
existing matplotlib calls.

That is, the plot() method on pandas’ Series and DataFrame is a wrapper
around plt.plot(). One convenience provided, for example, is that if the
DataFrame’s Index consists of dates, gcf().autofmt_xdate() is called internally
by pandas to get the current Figure and nicely auto-format the x-axis.

In turn, remember that plt.plot() (the state-based approach) is implicitly

aware of the current Figure and current Axes, so pandas is following the state-
based approach by extension.

We can prove this “chain” of function calls with a bit of introspection. First,
let’s construct a plain-vanilla pandas Series, assuming we’re starting out in a
fresh interpreter session:

>>>
>>> import pandas as pd

>>> s = pd.Series(np.arange(5), index=list('abcde'))

>>> ax = s.plot()

>>> type(ax)
<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot at 0x121083eb8>

>>> id(plt.gca()) == id(ax)

True
This internal architecture is helpful to know when you are mixing pandas
plotting methods with traditional matplotlib calls, which is done below in
plotting the moving average of a widely watched financial time series. ma is a
pandas Series for which we can call ma.plot()(the pandas method), and then
customize by retrieving the Axes that is created by this call (plt.gca()), for
matplotlib to reference:

>>>
>>> import pandas as pd
>>> import matplotlib.transforms as mtransforms
>>> url = 'https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.csv?id=VIXCLS'
>>> vix = pd.read_csv(url, index_col=0, parse_dates=True, na_values='.',
... infer_datetime_format=True,
... squeeze=True).dropna()
>>> ma = vix.rolling('90d').mean()
>>> state = pd.cut(ma, bins=[-np.inf, 14, 18, 24, np.inf],
... labels=range(4))

>>> cmap = plt.get_cmap('RdYlGn_r')

>>> ma.plot(color='black', linewidth=1.5, marker='', figsize=(8, 4),
... label='VIX 90d MA')
>>> ax = plt.gca() # Get the current Axes that ma.plot() references
>>> ax.set_xlabel('')
>>> ax.set_ylabel('90d moving average: CBOE VIX')
>>> ax.set_title('Volatility Regime State')
>>> ax.grid(False)
>>> ax.legend(loc='upper center')
>>> ax.set_xlim(xmin=ma.index[0], xmax=ma.index[-1])

>>> trans = mtransforms.blended_transform_factory(ax.transData,

ax.transAxes)
>>> for i, color in enumerate(cmap([0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8])):
... ax.fill_between(ma.index, 0, 1, where=state==i,
... facecolor=color, transform=trans)
>>> ax.axhline(vix.mean(), linestyle='dashed', color='xkcd:dark grey',
... alpha=0.6, label='Full-period mean', marker='')
There’s a lot happening above:

 ma is a 90-day moving average of the VIX Index, a measure of market

expectations of near-term stock volatility. state is a binning of the
moving average into different regime states. A high VIX is seen as
signaling a heightened level of fear in the marketplace.
 cmap is a ColorMap—a matplotlib object that is essentially a mapping of
floats to RGBA colors. Any colormap can be reversed by appending '_r',
so 'RdYlGn_r' is the reversed Red-Yellow-Green colormap. Matplotlib
maintains a handy visual reference guide to ColorMaps in its docs.
 The only real pandas call we’re making here is ma.plot(). This
calls plt.plot()internally, so to integrate the object-oriented approach,
we need to get an explicit reference to the current Axes with ax =
plt.gca().
 The second chunk of code creates color-filled blocks that correspond to
each bin of state. cmap([0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8]) says, “Get us an RGBA
sequence for the colors at the 20th, 40th, 60th, and 80th ‘percentile’
along the ColorMaps’ spectrum.” enumerate()is used because we want to
map each RGBA color back to a state.

Pandas also comes built-out with a smattering of more advanced plots (which
could take up an entire tutorial all on their own). However, all of these, like
their simpler counterparts, rely on matplotlib machinery internally.

Wrapping Up
As shown by some of the examples above, there’s no getting around the fact
that matplotlib can be a technical, syntax-heavy library. Creating a production-
ready chart sometimes requires a half hour of Googling and combining a
hodgepodge of lines in order to fine-tune a plot.

However, understanding how matplotlib’s interfaces interact is an investment

that can pay off down the road. As Real Python’s own Dan Bader has advised,
taking the time to dissect code rather than resorting to the Stack Overflow
“copy pasta” solution tends to be a smarter long-term solution. Sticking to the
object-oriented approach can save hours of frustration when you want to take
a plot from plain to a work of art.

More Resources
From the matplotlib documentation:

 An index of matplotlib examples

 The usage FAQ
  The tutorials page, which is broken up into beginner, intermediate, and
advanced sections
 Lifecylcle of a plot, which touches on the object-oriented versus stateful
approaches

Free Bonus: Click here to download 5 Python + Matplotlib examples with full
source code that you can use as a basis for making your own plots and
graphics.
Third-party resources:

 DataCamp’s matplotlib cheat sheet

 PLOS Computational Biology: Ten Simple Rules for Better Figures
 Chapter 9 (Plotting & Visualization) of Wes McKinney’s Python for Data
Analysis, 2nd ed.
 Chaper 11 (Visualization with Matplotlib, Pandas, and Seaborn) of Ted
Petrou’s Pandas Cookbook
 Section 1.4 (Matplotlib: Plotting) of the SciPy Lecture Notes
 The xkcd color palette
 The matplotlib external resources page
 Matplotlib, Pylab, Pyplot, etc: What’s the difference between these and
when to use each? from queirozf.com
 The visualization page in the pandas documentation

Other plotting libraries:

 The seaborn library, built on top of matplotlib and designed for

advanced statistical graphics, which could take up an entire tutorial all
on its own
 Datashader, a graphics library geared specifically towards large
datasets
 A list of other third-party packages from the matplotlib documentation

Appendix A: Configuration and Styling

If you’ve been following along with this tutorial, it’s likely that the plots
popping up on your screen look different stylistically than the ones shown
here.

Matplotlib offers two ways to configure style in a uniform way across different
plots:

1. By customizing a matplotlibrc file

2. By changing your configuration parameters interactively, or from
a .py script.
A matplotlibrc file (Option #1 above) is basically a text file specifying user-
customized settings that are remembered between Python sessions. On Mac
OS X, this normally resides at ~/.matplotlib/matplotlibrc.

Quick Tip: GitHub is a great place to keep configuration files. I keep mine here.
Just make sure that they don’t contain personally identifiable or private
information, such as passwords or SSH private keys!
Alternatively, you can change your configuration parameters interactively
(Option #2 above). When you import matplotlib.pyplot as plt, you get access
to an rcParams object that resembles a Python dictionary of settings. All of the
module objects starting with “rc” are a means to interact with your plot styles
and settings:

>>>
>>> [attr for attr in dir(plt) if attr.startswith('rc')]
['rc', 'rcParams', 'rcParamsDefault', 'rc_context', 'rcdefaults']
Of these:

 plt.rcdefaults() restores the rc parameters from matplotlib’s internal

defaults, which are listed at plt.rcParamsDefault. This will revert
(overwrite) whatever you’ve already customized in a matplotlibrc file.
 plt.rc() is used for setting parameters interactively.
 plt.rcParams is a (mutable) dictionary-like object that lets you
manipulate settings directly. If you have customized settings in a
matplotlibrc file, these will be reflected in this dictionary.

With plt.rc() and plt.rcParams, these two syntaxes are equivalent for
adjusting settings:

>>>
>>> plt.rc('lines', linewidth=2, color='r') # Syntax 1

>>> plt.rcParams['lines.linewidth'] = 2 # Syntax 2

>>> plt.rcParams['lines.color'] = 'r'
Notably, the Figure class then uses some of these as its default arguments.

Relatedly, a style is just a predefined cluster of custom settings. To view

available styles, use:

>>>
>>> plt.style.available
['seaborn-dark', 'seaborn-darkgrid', 'seaborn-ticks', 'fivethirtyeight',
'seaborn-whitegrid', 'classic', '_classic_test', 'fast', 'seaborn-talk',
 'seaborn-dark-palette', 'seaborn-bright', 'seaborn-pastel', 'grayscale',
'seaborn-notebook', 'ggplot', 'seaborn-colorblind', 'seaborn-muted',
'seaborn', 'Solarize_Light2', 'seaborn-paper', 'bmh', 'seaborn-white',
'dark_background', 'seaborn-poster', 'seaborn-deep']
To set a style, make this call:

>>>
>>> plt.style.use('fivethirtyeight')
Your plots will now take on a new look:

This full example is available here.

For inspiration, matplotlib keeps some style sheet displays for reference as
well.

Appendix B: Interactive Mode

Behind the scenes, matplotlib also interacts with different backends. A
backend is the workhorse behind actually rendering a chart. (On the popular
Anaconda distribution, for instance, the default backend is Qt5Agg.) Some
backends are interactive, meaning they are dynamically updated and “pop up”
to the user when changed.

While interactive mode is off by default, you can check its status
with plt.rcParams['interactive'] or plt.isinteractive(), and toggle it on and
off with plt.ion() and plt.ioff(), respectively:
>>>
>>> plt.rcParams['interactive'] # or: plt.isinteractive()
True
>>>
>>> plt.ioff()
>>> plt.rcParams['interactive']
False
In some code examples, you may notice the presence of plt.show() at the end
of a chunk of code. The main purpose of plt.show(), as the name implies, is to
actually “show” (open) the figure when you’re running with interactive mode
turned off. In other words:

 If interactive mode is on, you don’t need plt.show(), and images will
automatically pop-up and be updated as you reference them.
 If interactive mode is off, you’ll need plt.show() to display a figure
and plt.draw() to update a plot.

Below, we make sure that interactive mode is off, which requires that we
call plt.show()after building the plot itself:

>>>
>>> plt.ioff()
>>> x = np.arange(-4, 5)
>>> y1 = x ** 2
>>> y2 = 10 / (x ** 2 + 1)
>>> fig, ax = plt.subplots()
>>> ax.plot(x, y1, 'rx', x, y2, 'b+', linestyle='solid')
>>> ax.fill_between(x, y1, y2, where=y2>y1, interpolate=True,
... color='green', alpha=0.3)
>>> lgnd = ax.legend(['y1', 'y2'], loc='upper center', shadow=True)
>>> lgnd.get_frame().set_facecolor('#ffb19a')
>>> plt.show()
Notably, interactive mode has nothing to do with what IDE you’re using, or
whether you’ve enable inline plotting with something like jupyter notebook --
matplotlib inline or %matplotlib.