Shading an area boundered by a curve

Question

What would be the easiest way to lightly shade (or hatch; or anything to set it different from the rest) an area in a plot(), below a curve y=x^2, for example ?

Answer 1

Without messing with children, you can also:

x = 0:pi/10:2*pi;  % from your example
y = x.^2.;    % from your example

H=area(x,y);
set(H(1),'FaceColor','k');
alpha(.5);

Worked for me, it also helped with some legend issues that I was having.

. To kick a dead question