Is it possible to do additive blending with matplotlib?

If you only need an image as the result, you can get the canvas buffer as a numpy array, and then do the blending, here is an example:

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.scatter(x1,y1,c='b',edgecolors='none')
ax.set_xlim(-4, 4)
ax.set_ylim(-4, 4)
ax.patch.set_facecolor("none")
ax.patch.set_edgecolor("none")
fig.canvas.draw()

w, h = fig.canvas.get_width_height()
img = np.frombuffer(fig.canvas.buffer_rgba(), np.uint8).reshape(h, w, -1).copy()

ax.clear()
ax.scatter(x2,y2,c='r',edgecolors='none')
ax.set_xlim(-4, 4)
ax.set_ylim(-4, 4)
ax.patch.set_facecolor("none")
ax.patch.set_edgecolor("none")
fig.canvas.draw()

img2 = np.frombuffer(fig.canvas.buffer_rgba(), np.uint8).reshape(h, w, -1).copy()

img[img[:, :, -1] == 0] = 0
img2[img2[:, :, -1] == 0] = 0

fig.clf()

plt.imshow(np.maximum(img, img2))
plt.subplots_adjust(0, 0, 1, 1)
plt.axis("off")
plt.show()

the result:

This feature is now supported by my matplotlib backend https://github.com/anntzer/mplcairo (master only):

import matplotlib; matplotlib.use("module://mplcairo.qt")
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from mplcairo import operator_t
import numpy as np

x1 = np.random.randn(1000)
y1 = np.random.randn(1000)
x2 = np.random.randn(1000) * 5
y2 = np.random.randn(1000)
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
# The figure and axes background must be made transparent.
fig.patch.set(alpha=0)
ax.patch.set(alpha=0)
pc1 = ax.scatter(x1, y1, c='b', edgecolors='none')
pc2 = ax.scatter(x2, y2, c='r', edgecolors='none')
operator_t.ADD.patch_artist(pc2)  # Use additive blending.
plt.show()