We will continue using the base graphics library functions, so we need not load any additional library or package. We just need to run the recipe code at the R prompt. We can also save the code as a script to use it later. Here, we will use the metals.csv example dataset again:

metals<-read.csv("metals.csv")

We can build a box plot with custom colors, widths, and styles in the following way:

boxplot(metals[,-1],
border = "white",col = "black",boxwex = 0.3,
medlwd=1, whiskcol="black",staplecol="black",
outcol="red",cex=0.3,outpch=19,
main="Summary of metal concentrations by Site")

grid(nx=NA,ny=NULL,col="gray",lty="dashed")

We have used a few different arguments in the example to change the styling of the box plot. The first two are col and border, which set...