My art background starts back a fair bit with a degree in Art Education. Unfortunately I found I loved the art but hated the whole school thing so have had a nifty career in retail management instead. I continued to so some painting, and then digital photography came along. Being terribly cheap I never really explored photography to the fullest before, but with digital I snap away.  At this point I have a few thousand pictures over at Flickr. Through that I've been using Photoshop Elements for a while, and one day looking at a web article about the best free arts software I came across the 3D programs. Played with Daz, Bryce, and Blender and got hooked.
Once I discovered Renderosity and similar sites, I was just floored by the amazing quality of art that's being produced in digital media these days.  I decided I wanted to move up to a more complete program than the free bryce so I took some time and looked through the galleries here just looking at genre and seeing what I really liked and what program it was done in. I found that a lot of the images I really liked were done in Vue, so i saved up and went for that. I've been in 6 Prostudio for a while now and am about to bump up to 7 Complete to get my hands on ecopainting. I've also found I really like modeling and ended up using MoI that I found to be very intuitive for the way my mind works. All this 3D has happened just within the last year. I am still learning every day, and hopefully that will continue for years.