color coding for numbers

[namenobodywants at gmail.com]

hello

what is the best way of using color/shading on a tkinter canvas as a visualization for a two-dimensional grid of numbers? so far my best idea is to use the same value for R,G and B (fill = '#xyxyxy'), which gives shades of gray. if possible i'd like to have a larger number of visually distinct values. i've seen visualizations that seem to use some kind of hot-versus-cold color coding. does anybody know how to do this? thanks if you can help.

peace
stm