6.2 Working with Matplotlib objects directly

Till now, we have used the pyplot module of matplotlib. This module makes it easy for us to use the most important plot commands directly. Mostly, we are interested in creating a figure and displaying it immediately. Sometimes, though, we want to generate a figure that should be modified later by changing some of its attributes. This requires us to work with graphical objects in an object-oriented way. In this section, we will present some basic steps to modify figures. For a more sophisticated object-oriented approach to plotting in Python, you have to leave pyplot and have to dive directly into matplotlib with its extensive documentation.