3D Animation and Drawing

I have been running out of ideas for this site a bit lately so I figured I would post on what I've been doing lately. While I'm not much of an artist, generally (I am somewhat into photography), I would like to learn to do some 3d drawing for the occasional small project. The last couple days I have been actually getting around to messing with a well known tool called blender. Blender is a great and very powerful animation/modeling package with a not quite standard interface. The interface is based on lots of small sub windows and lots of hotkeys. Often the hotkeys bring up more menus with options difficult to find through the main menus. It also uses all three mouse buttons, which doesn't bother me much but people not used to the middle mouse button (the scroll wheel on a lot of modern mice) doing something separate may have trouble with it initially.

The good news is that there are lots of free tutorials available on the web (just do a search on google) aimed at people with varying levels of skill. I found some of the video tutorials listed on the blender site very helpful. I also had another very helpful tutorial I found quite awhile ago, printed and threw in the "get to it later" pile (unfortunately I can't find it on the web anymore). I also found this snowman tutorial a good all around how to do basic modeling tutorial once you have a basic handle on the interface. If anyone gives blender a try and finds some documentation you like please do post it in the comments.

Here is what I ended up with after doing the snowman tutorial and a little of my own adjusting: