# How to change colormap for plotting with arrows()?
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-change-colormap-for-plotting-with-arrows/109323
**Category:** New to Julia
**Tags:** makie
**Created:** [January 26, 2024, 11:05pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-change-colormap-for-plotting-with-arrows/109323 "2024-01-26T23:05:55Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Midez](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Midez)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2024, 11:05pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-change-colormap-for-plotting-with-arrows/109323/1 "2024-01-26T23:05:55Z")
Julia has an awesome documentation, including an example for [arrows()](https://docs.makie.org/stable/reference/plots/arrows/). However I don’t figure, how to change the colormap that shows the strength of the arrows. I’d like to change it to :bluesreds. If you know how, let me know. 😃
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### Author:  [@mkitti](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mkitti)
#### Post date: [January 27, 2024, 2:33am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-change-colormap-for-plotting-with-arrows/109323/2 "2024-01-27T02:33:23Z")
There is a `colormap` attribute. The available colormaps are listed here:
[https://docs.makie.org/stable/explanations/colors/#colormaps](https://docs.makie.org/stable/explanations/colors/#colormaps)
I modified the script slightly to set the keyword attribute `colormap = :bluesreds` as below.
```julia
using GLMakie
f = Figure(size = (800, 800))
Axis(f[1, 1], backgroundcolor = "black")
xs = LinRange(0, 2pi, 20)
ys = LinRange(0, 3pi, 20)
us = [sin(x) * cos(y) for x in xs, y in ys]
vs = [-cos(x) * sin(y) for x in xs, y in ys]
strength = vec(sqrt.(us .^ 2 .+ vs .^ 2))
arrows!(xs, ys, us, vs, arrowsize = 10, lengthscale = 0.3,
arrowcolor = strength, linecolor = strength, colormap = :bluesreds)
f
```
I got the following result.
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### Author:  [@Midez](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Midez)
#### Post date: [January 27, 2024, 11:06am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-change-colormap-for-plotting-with-arrows/109323/3 "2024-01-27T11:06:47Z")
> [@mkitti](#):
>
> `colormap = :bluesreds`
Great, thank you! I have also tried that, but Visual Studio didn’t show me a picture (only if I remove the colormap attribute). Seems it was a bug. Now where I restarted it all works fine.
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### Author:  [@mkitti](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mkitti)
#### Post date: [January 27, 2024, 11:09am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-change-colormap-for-plotting-with-arrows/109323/4 "2024-01-27T11:09:52Z")
Note that within a REPL session, the last `f` is very critical. This implicitly invokes the equivalent of `display(f)`, which causes the figure to show up.
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### Author:  [@jacobusmmsmit](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/jacobusmmsmit)
#### Post date: [January 27, 2024, 12:49pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-change-colormap-for-plotting-with-arrows/109323/5 "2024-01-27T12:49:33Z")
For this reason I typically wrap my plotting functions in a `begin end` block that always ends with `fig` so no matter what I change the figure always comes out 🙂