Black-white/Gray bar charts in Python

Question

I have following small data:

         Tom  Dick  Harry  Jack
Sub                            
Maths      9    12      3    10
Science   16    40      1    10
English   12    11      4    15
French    17    15      2    15
Sports    23    19      3    15

I want to create a bar chart in black-white/gray colors for these data.

I can have such a figure with following code:

df.plot(kind='bar', colormap='gray')
plt.show()

However, the fourth bar (Jack's) is pure white and same as background. How can I avoid this problem of last bar being pure white?

Answer 1

Use the other colormaps or manually enter the color names. Alternatively you can change the background by using different style sheet such as ggplot,seabor or fivethirty eight.

colors=['darkgray','gray','dimgray','lightgray']
df.plot(kind='bar',color=colors )
plt.show()

 df.plot(kind='bar',colormap=plt.cm.viridis )
 plt.show()

Using the style sheets here: https://matplotlib.org/3.1.1/gallery/style_sheets/style_sheets_reference.html

plt.style.use('seaborn')#change the style sheets here
df.plot(kind='bar',colormap=plt.cm.gray)
plt.show()

Here is the output looks like: