Gradient fill beneath line chart using matplotlib?

Question

I\'m trying to product a line chart with a gradient fill beneath the line. I have searched for hours online for a solution, but none of them deal specifically with what I\'m loo

Answer 1

There is actually a fairly nice answer to this at this SO question, and the following borrows the main idea, but I've substituted a call to imshow rather than contourf because I think it looks smoother. I borrow the key element, which is to place the gradient over the whole image and then 'erase' above the data using fill_between.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import datetime
import matplotlib.dates as mdates

# Fake data using dates as requested
xdata = np.array([datetime.datetime.today()+
                 datetime.timedelta(days=1)*i for i in range(15)])
ydata = np.cumsum(np.random.uniform(size=len(xdata)))
xlims = mdates.date2num([xdata[0], xdata[-1]])

# Construct an image linearly increasing in y
xv, yv = np.meshgrid(np.linspace(0,1,50), np.linspace(0,1,50))
zv = yv

# Draw the image over the whole plot area
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(5,3))
ax.imshow(zv, cmap='YlGnBu_r', origin='lower',
          extent=[xlims[0], xlims[1], ydata.min(), ydata.max()])

# Erase above the data by filling with white
ax.fill_between(xdata, ydata, ydata.max(), color='w')

# Make the line plot over the top
ax.plot(xdata, ydata, 'b-', linewidth=2)

ax.set_ylim(ydata.min(), ydata.max())
fig.autofmt_xdate()

plt.show()

This gives me this plot: