How to Set Colors for Bar Plot in Matplotlib – Python

In this tutorial, we will see how to set colors for Bar Plot in Python using Matplotlib. It provides a wide range of plotting functions and tools for creating figures, plots, histograms, power spectra, bar charts, error charts, scatterplots, etc.

Set bar colors for the bar chart in Matplotlib

To set the color for the bars in Matplotlib, we can use color parameters with the color name like ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘blue’ or the hex value like ‘#8b0202’, ‘#F4BB44’, ‘#FFED85’, etc.

We can provide a single color value, or a list of colors to the color parameter.

ax.bar(fruit, price, color='red') #Color name as parameter
ax.bar(fruit, price, color=['red', 'green']) #Multiple color name as parameter
ax.bar(fruit, price, color='#8b0202') #HEX value as parameter
ax.bar(fruit, price, color=[#8b0202', '#F4BB44']) #Multiple HEX value as parameter

Single Color and Multi-Color bar chart

Here in this example, I took a sample data frame with fruit and its prices. We will plot the data frame in a 2,1 subplot to show one subplot with all bars single-colored in the second subplot. I used a multicolor bar chart in which each bar has a different color.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

#Sample dataframe
fruit = ['Apple', 'Mango', 'Banana', 'Orange']
price = [149, 110, 60, 45]

# Create a figure and 2 subplots
fig, ax = plt.subplots(2,1)
# Plot a bar chart on the first subplot
ax[0].bar(fruit, price, color='orange')
ax[0].set_xlabel('Fruits')
ax[0].set_ylabel('Price')
ax[0].set_title('Single Color')

# Plot a bar chart on the second subplot
ax[1].bar(fruit, price, color=['#8b0202', '#F4BB44', '#FFED85', '#FFA500'])
ax[1].set_xlabel('Fruits')
ax[1].set_ylabel('Price')
ax[1].set_title('Multi Color')
# Show the plot
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

Output