figure of imshow() is too small

If you don't give an aspect argument to imshow, it will use the value for image.aspect in your matplotlibrc. The default for this value in a new matplotlibrc is equal. So imshow will plot your array with equal aspect ratio.

If you don't need an equal aspect you can set aspect to auto

imshow(random.rand(8, 90), interpolation='nearest', aspect='auto')

which gives the following figure

If you want an equal aspect ratio you have to adapt your figsize according to the aspect

fig, ax = subplots(figsize=(18, 2))
ax.imshow(random.rand(8, 90), interpolation='nearest')
tight_layout()

which gives you:

I'm new to python too. Here is something that looks like will do what you want to

axes([0.08, 0.08, 0.94-0.08, 0.94-0.08]) #[left, bottom, width, height]
axis('scaled')`

I believe this decides the size of the canvas.

That's strange, it definitely works for me:

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

plt.figure(figsize = (20,2))
plt.imshow(random.rand(8, 90), interpolation='nearest')

I am using the "MacOSX" backend, btw.

Update 2020

as requested by @baxxx, here is an update because random.rand is deprecated meanwhile.

This works with matplotlip 3.2.1:

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import random
import numpy as np

random = np.random.random ([8,90])

plt.figure(figsize = (20,2))
plt.imshow(random, interpolation='nearest')

This plots:

To change the random number, you can experiment with np.random.normal(0,1,(8,90)) (here mean = 0, standard deviation = 1).