Values of appearance properties can come from several places in the component hierarchy. SeriesRenderer -derived objects can use attributes from their local SeriesStyle, from plot's SeriesStyle, or from the *Series properties in current Theme. Component classes use either their local properties or ones defined in the theme. By default, appearance properties in SeriesRenderer and Component classes have null values, which makes the drawing code use values from the theme.

The SeriesStyle interface defines how SeriesRenderer objects get appearance attributes for series elements, where each element of each series can generally be drawn in distinct style from others. You could implement that interface in your own class to calculate stroke and fill colors dynamically based on series and element indices. For example, you could paint climbing values in green and falling values in red if drawing financial charts, or calculate a blue-red gradient if drawing temperatures.

There are several SeriesStyle classes provided out-of-the-box that implement various levels of distinctness for graphical elements drawn for each data item. UniformSeriesStyle uses same attributes for all elements of all series. PerSeriesStyle contains different attributes for different series, where all elements in the series are drawn with same attributes. PerElementSeriesStyle allows customization of each element of each series. MixedSeriesStyle allows a mix of uniform, per-element and per-series attributes.