The easiest way to change the background color of a plot in Matplotlib is to use the set_facecolor() argument.
If you define a figure and axis in Matplotlib using the following syntax:
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
Then you can simply use the following syntax to define the background color of the plot:
ax.set_facecolor('pink')
This tutorial provides several examples of how to use this function in practice.
Example 1: Set Background Color Using Color Name
The following code shows how to set the background color of a Matplotlib plot by using the name of a color:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt #define plot figure and axis fig, ax = plt.subplots() #define two arrays for plotting A = [3, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8] B = [12, 14, 17, 20, 22, 27] #create scatterplot and specify background color to be pink ax.scatter(A, B) ax.set_facecolor('pink') #display scatterplot plt.show()
Example 2: Set Background Color Using Hex Color Code
The following code shows how to set the background color of a Matplotlib plot by using a hex color code:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt #define plot figure and axis fig, ax = plt.subplots() #define two arrays for plotting A = [3, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8] B = [12, 14, 17, 20, 22, 27] #create scatterplot and specify background color to be pink ax.scatter(A, B) ax.set_facecolor('#33FFA2') #display scatterplot plt.show()
Example 3: Set Background Color of Specific Subplot
Sometimes you’ll have more than one Matplotlib plot. In this case, you can use the following code to specify the background color for a single plot:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt #define subplots fig, ax = plt.subplots(2, 2) fig.tight_layout() #define background color to use for each subplot ax[0,0].set_facecolor('blue') ax[0,1].set_facecolor('pink') ax[1,0].set_facecolor('green') ax[1,1].set_facecolor('red') #display subplots plt.show()
