I would appreciate it if people would briefly describe the reasons for their votes :3

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why the hell not?
If it works, it works baby! I'm all for methods of efficiency.

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Through this life of bees.

It isn't a bad thing, and it isn't a mater of copyrights. As long as your not strictly copying a picture (and even if you are, you're completely redrawing it anyway, so it wont look exactly like it), then I see no problem with it.

Your just referencing colors from the photo, so it is still referencing really. (I think you're better off at least trying to find the color on your own, but if you just can't seem to make it on your own, then by all means eye drop the color! It isn't that big of a deal.)

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It really doesn't matter.

To say it's cheating to use the color picker is akin to saying it's cheating to use a ruler to get a straight line.

'Tis just my opinion, of course. :]

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I think it's perfectly acceptable I do it more often when I'm painting skin because I struggle with painting skin. It's helped me a lot because I used to only use 3 (base, shadows + light) . Altho, come to think of it, since I think I'm improving a little, I'm using swatches more often too and trying not to use photos. Still. Acceptable IMO

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Depends on what you're doing. If you're just trying to paint a good piece, sure, why not? Not like it's cheating any more than referencing is cheating.

But, if you're trying to improve your eye for color and want to not *need* to eyedropper, then you probably shouldn't.

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Useful, but defeats the purpose of painting the picture yourself.

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My first thought was that it's totally cheating, but I thought about it and now I think that you're only taking the colour, not the way it's drawn. So in the end, it's just a different method of digital working and if it's the way you do it then go ahead. It's the way you draw it that makes the picture, not necessarily the colours.

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I think it's totally acceptable. I don't think it defeats the purpose of painting at all - it's not like you're copying and pasting the whole thing. It still takes skill to reproduce it accurately, and unless you want to eyedropper every single pixel, you still need to judge where the colour changes. Sure, traditional painters can't use this method, but it seems wasteful to avoid it just because it's not the way it's been done in traditional art.

But true, you could be stopping yourself from practising skills you need. Also with any direct copying like tracing lineart I think there's a potential for it to end up looking lifeless if you don't understand the image you're copying. And if you don't want to change any of the colours that you copy, you'd want to hope the colours in the reference photo are pretty darn good

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If eyedropping is considered "cheating" then I think we need to start thinking what cheating means in the realm of art. Is landscape painting cheating, if its photorealistic? In the old days of the Renaissance, painters used to make their own pigments and mix them themselves. Now we go to a store and buy a tube. Is that cheating? No... art is an expression of human progress as much as it is an expression of human culture/emotion etc. As technology increases so does our ways of producing art. Yes, technology makes it easier for us to produce art, but it also demands that we bring something more to it to make it all that more spectacular. Finally, do not forget that the word technology comes from the Greek word τεχνη (techne) which means art.