How to pass rgb color values to python's matplotlib eventplot?

Question

I'm simply trying to plot some tick marks with a specific color using matplotlib's eventplot. I'm running Python 3 in Jupyter notebook with %matplotlib inline.

Here's an example code:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt    
spikes = 100*np.random.random(100)
plt.eventplot(spikes, orientation='horizontal', linelengths=0.9, color=[0.3,0.3,0.5])

It outputs the following error:

ValueError: colors and positions are unequal sized sequences

The error occurs presumably because I am not providing a list of colors of the same length as the data (but I wan't them to all just be the same color!). It also gives an error when I use a color string like 'crimson' or 'orchid'. But it works when I use a simple one-letter string like 'r'.

Am I really restricted to just using the extremely limited set of one-letter color strings 'r','b','g','k','m','y', etc... or making a long color list when using this eventplot?

Answer 1

According to the docs:

you can pass an (r, g, b) or (r, g, b, a) tuple, where each of r, g, b and a are in the range [0,1].

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

spikes = 100*np.random.random(100)
plt.eventplot(spikes, orientation='horizontal', linelengths=0.9, color = [(0.3,0.3,0.5)])

plt.show()

Answer 2

# for a list of three plotted variables

df = data[['x', 'y', 'z']]
color_theme=[(52/235, 235/235, 86/235), (52/235, 70/235, 235/235), 
(165/235, 52/235, 235/235)]           
df.plot(color=color_theme)

# where numerators are the R,G,B numbers
# python only uses RGB in numbers <1
# denominator is obviously the max RGB quantity on a normal RGB scale