You can reset the colorcycle to the original with Axes.set_color_cycle. Looking at the code for this, there is a function to do the actual work:
def set_color_cycle(self, clist=None):
if clist is None:
clist = rcParams['axes.color_cycle']
self.color_cycle = itertools.cycle(clist
And a method on the Axes which uses it:
def set_color_cycle(self, clist):
"""
Set the color cycle for any future plot commands on this Axes.
*clist* is a list of mpl color specifiers.
"""
self._get_lines.set_color_cycle(clist)
self._get_patches_for_fill.set_color_cycle(clist)
This basically means you can call the set_color_cycle with None as the only argument, and it will be replaced with the default cycle found in rcParams[‘axes.color_cycle’].
I tried this with the following code and got the expected result:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
for i in range(3):
plt.plot(np.arange(10) + i)
# for Matplotlib version < 1.5
plt.gca().set_color_cycle(None)
# for Matplotlib version >= 1.5
plt.gca().set_prop_cycle(None)
for i in range(3):
plt.plot(np.arange(10, 1, -1) + i)
plt.show()