Manually set color of points in legend

Question

I\'m making a scatter plot which looks like this:

(MWE at bottom of qu

Answer 1

You can obtain the legend handles and change their colors doing:

ax = plt.gca()
leg = ax.get_legend()
leg.legendHandles[0].set_color('red')
leg.legendHandles[1].set_color('yellow')

Answer 2

You can retrieve the label of each legend handle with lh.get_label() if you want to map colors to specific labels.

For my purposes it worked best to create a dict from legendHandles and change the colors like so:

ax = plt.gca()
leg = ax.get_legend()
hl_dict = {handle.get_label(): handle for handle in leg.legendHandles}
hl_dict['9'].set_color('red')
hl_dict['8'].set_color('yellow')