Create own colormap using matplotlib and plot color scale

Question

I have the following problem, I want to create my own colormap (red-mix-violet-mix-blue) that maps to values between -2 and +2 and want to use it to color points in my plot.

Answer 1

If you want to automate the creating of a custom divergent colormap commonly used for surface plots, this module combined with @unutbu method worked well for me.

def diverge_map(high=(0.565, 0.392, 0.173), low=(0.094, 0.310, 0.635)):
    '''
    low and high are colors that will be used for the two
    ends of the spectrum. they can be either color strings
    or rgb color tuples
    '''
    c = mcolors.ColorConverter().to_rgb
    if isinstance(low, basestring): low = c(low)
    if isinstance(high, basestring): high = c(high)
    return make_colormap([low, c('white'), 0.5, c('white'), high])

The high and low values can be either string color names or rgb tuples. This is the result using the surface plot demo: