Depending on the kind of art you're doing (if, say, you're wanting to do comics/cartoons) you might want to give the Manga Studio Debut download a try.
I'll warn ya right now, I found the interfaces more maddening to learn than Illustrator is (I still have never gotten the hang of Illustrator, I think its cuz its widget layout is so much like Photoshop visually, that my brain has a hard time switching over from how one *works* to the other, if that makes any sense). It's essentially an English translation of a Japanese product, but it's got some great tools and features in it (the pen tools are about a brazillion times better than the Photoshop brushes I've been able to figure out, but it also has a lot of nice preset page layouts if you're interested in print-type-stuff). The coloring isn't so great (you only get 2 colors per layer, apparently), so I'm in the process of moving over from using PS for inking (when I'm not doing it by hand) to inking in Manga Studio and exporting to PS for coloring (though it does have a pretty large amount of comic tones you can utilize if you're into that sort of thing).
Personally, I'd like to learn to use Illustrator some day, but until then this seems to be a workable system.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I dunno why I found MS to be so much easier to learn than Illustrator. I think it might be how the pen tool works and what not. Anyway, I'm babbling.