Gradient of n colors ranging from color 1 and color 2

Question

colorRampPalette could be your friend here:

colfunc <- colorRampPalette(c("black", "white"))
colfunc(10)
# [1] "#000000" "#1C1C1C" "#383838" "#555555" "#717171" "#8D8D8D" "#AAAAAA"
# [8] "#C6C6C6" "#E2E2E2" "#FFFFFF"

And just to show it works:

plot(rep(1,10),col=colfunc(10),pch=19,cex=3)

Just to expand on the previous answer colorRampPalettecan handle more than two colors.

So for a more expanded "heat map" type look you can....

colfunc<-colorRampPalette(c("red","yellow","springgreen","royalblue"))
plot(rep(1,50),col=(colfunc(50)), pch=19,cex=2)

The resulting image:

Try the following:

color.gradient <- function(x, colors=c("red","yellow","green"), colsteps=100) {
  return( colorRampPalette(colors) (colsteps) [ findInterval(x, seq(min(x),max(x), length.out=colsteps)) ] )
}
x <- c((1:100)^2, (100:1)^2)
plot(x,col=color.gradient(x), pch=19,cex=2)

The above answer is useful but in graphs, it is difficult to distinguish between darker gradients of black. One alternative I found is to use gradients of gray colors as follows

palette(gray.colors(10, 0.9, 0.4))
plot(rep(1,10),col=1:10,pch=19,cex=3))

More info on gray scale here.

Added

When I used the code above for different colours like blue and black, the gradients were not that clear. heat.colors() seems more useful.

This document has more detailed information and options. pdf