How to add more items to the matplotlib legend?

When I encountered this problem a couple hours ago I thought it'd only take a few minutes of googling to resolve, but here I am. I plot all my values using a single plt.bar() call: ``` plt.bar(range(len(vals)), vals, width=1, color=colors) ``` This creates a bar graph where the bars are color coded. When I try to create a legend, it only displays one color along with one label. So for example doing this: ``` labels = ['Group 1', 'Group 2', 'Group 3'] plt.legend(labels, loc='best', ncol=3) ``` Only shows 'Group 1' on the legend along with one of the many bar colors. How can I add more items to the legend? I know that this issue is because I am assigning multiple colors in a single plot, but that is the cleanest solution for that part in this case. Resources I found suggested using "ax.get_legend_handles_labels()", but that returns two empty lists for me. EDIT: @falsetru, Here is a code sample which describes the issue after applying your solution. I included all the relevant parts. ``` import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import matplotlib.cm as cm import numpy as np items= ['item1','item2','item3'] #item names vals = [1, 2, 3] #values to be plotted groups = [['item1','item2'], ['item3']] #defines item groupings colors = [''] * len(items) color_space = iter(cm.Paired(np.linspace(0, 1, len(groups)))) for c in groups: col = next(color_space) for l in c: i = items.index(l) colors[i] = col for i, (val, c) in enumerate(zip(vals, colors)): plt.bar([i], [val], width=1, color=c) labels = ['Group 1', 'Group 2'] plt.legend(labels, loc='best') plt.show() ``` This is the output, but I'd like group 2 to show the next color.