When I first discovered colour scales, and started to move away from the simple R base graphics col = "red" style of notation, it took me a while to figure out how to actually use a colour scale in R - how to break it up into distinct colours and tell a plotting function which colour to use for what. When I get stuck on something, I often make a note of it, thinking that once I figure it out, it might be worth a blog post… so here we are.
