prop_cycle
color_cycle
was deprecated in 1.5 in favor of this generalization: http://matplotlib.org/users/whats_new.html#added-axes-prop-cycle-key-to-rcparams
# cycler is a separate package extracted from matplotlib.
from cycler import cycler
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.rc('axes', prop_cycle=(cycler('color', ['r', 'g', 'b'])))
plt.plot([1, 2])
plt.plot([2, 3])
plt.plot([3, 4])
plt.plot([4, 5])
plt.plot([5, 6])
plt.show()
Also shown in the (now badly named) example: http://matplotlib.org/1.5.1/examples/color/color_cycle_demo.html mentioned at: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4971431/895245
Tested in matplotlib 1.5.1.