People think that if you want to make it, you need all the up to date tech for digital art. As this is a big help, it’s not really true. There’s so much free software on line the mind boggles, 3D Blender for example is awesome, I’ve downloaded it, it’s so professional and sleek. I read somewhere (can’t remember it was so long ago) a professor at a university was arguing with one of his students who didn’t want to fork out a fortune for the software that was being used for his lectures, because A, it was hundreds of dollar and B, it was mush better than what they were using anyway, the professor tried it and has never looked back. Trust me, if animation and modelling is you thing, use Blender. It is a huge program though so your computer might have a mental break down.

Blender also holds a competition to pick up the cream of the self taught gods, they bring these people in to make a movie/game to promote blender and also to upgrade and de-bug the currant version. This is a huge opportunity for people, a lot of the team who make the movies/games are scooped up by the likes of Pixar, could you imagine that!?
There’s loads on tutorials on their website to get you going as well.

Gimp is another brilliant, FREE software to starting artists to use, I used it for years, I learnt everything on it, its how I learnt everything I know now. Not buggy, I used to run it on my old laptop, so currant computers are able to cope fine. You can also use drawing tablets with it too. Good editing software for a photographer. So that’s one for the shopping list! I know for a fact that loads of people on deviant art use this. It does everything that the mid range of photoshop does and is updated a lot.

So there’s two fantastic free programs you can use, and they are highly recommended by people who’ve used them.

The only thing that I think people should buy is a drawing tablet.