Well, It really depends on what you consider digital art to be, since I don't know your opinon, I will address some of the things I consider digital art. If you want to make complex reconstructions of an object, for example you want to re-draw a car, or house, or create something like that out of you own creativty, abstract, textb-based or something like that, I would say go for Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Fireworks, or JASC PaintShop Pro. Those are really good vector-based drawing programs. They are loaded with tools and goodies. Although they are mostly vector-based (vector image: a computer image that uses mathmatical descriptions of paths and fills to define the graphic.), you can export your drawings as raster (jpeg, etc). To see weather or not this is the type of art that you would like to create, go to http://www.deviantart.com and thumb through the catagories until you see "digital art", choose it, and choose "vector" for your sub-catagory. On the other-hand, photo manipulation with programs such as Adobe PhotoShop and Adobe ImageReady (ImageReady is typically more for animation) has become a widely adopted art form and is virtually full of possibilities to create digital art. You can also see examples of these at www.deviantart.com. If you decide you love digital art and you want to experiance more, some of the programs you might want to check out: Adobe InDesign (desktop publishing, opposite; QuarkXPress) Adobe Premiere (video) Macromedia Flash, Flex (animation), Dreamweaver (website design) discreet 3DStudio Max, MAYA (3D modeling and animation, check out www.3dkingdom.org for examples.) Sony SoundForge (audio) FruityLoops Studio (audio) Corel also has quite a line for digital imagery This is just to name a few of the leading software distributers among very many, there is also some free software that you can search for on google just by searching something like.. Adobe Illustrator Free Alternative, or whatever you may be looking for.

I just want to add another program to the already great list. Bryce 5 is a fun graphic program where you select the skies, mountains, objects, and such. Not very user friendly unless you are familiar with some of the graphic/CAD terms. The more you play and learn, the more fantastic pictures you'll be able to create.

Bryce, Adobe photoshop, paintshop pro, dogwaffle,(free version) fractal explorer,(free) terragen,(free version) Apophysis, (free version)All depends on what type of art you wish to make. I have info and downloads available at my personal site. http://horizertical.com/PHP-Nuke/modules.php?name=Web_Links

Adobe Photoshop or the Free GimpShop are both pretty good. However i believe more professional people use PhotoShop. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDUQPD0V2Co

It depends on the kind of art you intend to create. The industry standard raster editor is Adobe's Photoshop. For vector work, it's Adobe's Illustrator. In case you're not familiar with the terms, a raster image is commonly called a bitmap, and it consists of a field of pixels. A vector image is made up of curves described my mathematical formulas. Raster images are easier to understand and work with, but they cannot be resized easily. Vector images can be resized without losing any quality, but they aren't very good at making "realistic" images. If you want to do 3d, then look into Maya or 3d Studio MAX. If you're just wanting to get your feet wet and learn how things work, you don't need to pay the significant costs for pro software. Gimp is an open source competitor of Photoshop, Inkscape is the same for Illustrator, and Blender can be used for most 3d. If you want to do 3d landscapes, Bryce is the place to look. There are also a variety of other packages, such as CorelDRAW (vector), Paint Shop Pro (raster), Xara (both raster and vector--I think it's unique in that respect), Animation: Master, and a few others. Macromedia's DX suite was quite helpful, also, but you'd have to get that used since Adobe purchased Macromedia and has not updated most of that software. If you want a good community for support in digital artwork, check out the CG Society: http://www.cgsociety.org It'll be like drinking from a fire hose at first, but there are tons of great artists there willing and ready to help you out.

Photoshop is a good program.

Adobe Elements 6.0

It depends on what kind of Digital art you want to do. If you want to do digital landscapes then Terragen is an excellent program! It is a small and quick download, easy to learn and use, and it is free!