For a beginner to digital art with previous traditional art experience, Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter and PaintChat are all great. PaintChat is the only free application of the three, the rest are 30-day trials.

As for beginning in the field of drawing/painting, stick with a pencil, marker or ink pen, and many sheets of cheap paper. Don't buy the expensive art sketchbooks from stores, look into the kind of 6x8" to 9x12" notebooks you use for school. The blank notebooks without any stylesheet lines are what you're looking for, and they're sometimes ten to fifteen times cheaper than regular sketchbooks per page, at least over here in Sweden.

The best way to learn is to draw from life, and you will develop a sense of form and lighting impact far better than what can be learnt from studying photographs. If you do study photographs, try not to "copy" them, but try to understand them. Why does the light fall upon the object the way it does? How do the plants in the far background grow? Feel the gesture of the scene.

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