The question of how to use color palettes from art history and master painting in contemporary digital work is one I find endlessly interesting.

The practice I use: I sample color palettes from artworks I admire into a swatch document. Not exact colors necessarily — interpreted versions at the chroma and temperature relationships that give the original its feeling. Then I use these as starting palettes for my own work.

What this teaches: the constraint of someone else's palette decisions forces you to find solutions within those terms. You can't reach for your default go-to colors. This breaks habits and produces unexpected results.

The most useful palettes I've worked from: Vermeer's controlled light interiors (a very narrow range of values, luminous lights), Turner's atmospheric landscapes (every color pushed toward the ambient sky color), and Hiroshi Yoshida's woodblock prints (limited palette, bold temperature contrasts). Each taught me something I couldn't have learned from a color theory textbook.