How to change the color of an axis with matplotlib ?

Changing the axis color in matplotlib is a straight-forward process. Examples

Using set_color()

To change the color of the axes, you can use the 'spines.set_color()' method. This method takes one argument, which is the desired axis color. It can be specified as any valid Matplotlib color string or an HEX color code. For example, to change the x-axis color to blue, you would use this syntax:

ax.spines['bottom'].set_color('red')

Example:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
y = [4,1,3,6,1,3,5,2]

ax = plt.subplot(111)

plt.scatter(x,y)

ax.set_xlabel('X')
ax.set_ylabel('Y')

ax.spines['bottom'].set_color('red')
ax.spines['top'].set_color('blue') 
ax.spines['right'].set_color('green')
ax.spines['left'].set_color('black')

plt.title('How to change axis color with matplotlib ?')

plt.savefig('matplotlib_color_axis_01.png')

plt.show()

Output

Additional features

Change color of axis ticks

ax.tick_params(axis='x', colors='red')

Change color of axis title

ax.xaxis.label.set_color('red')

References