As usual, a lot depends on what you want to accomplish. 2D or 3D? Line art (vector graphics) for logos, illustration or such or 'photo-real' work (bitmap graphics). Bit of a dilema here, as i wrote an e-book that answers all your questions in depth, but don't want to "promote" it here. You could Google organic "3D art skills" to locate my free chapter on lighting, free 3D based tutorials, a few free 3D models, etc.
There are many online digital art forums where people share info and post to the galleries - the largest and oldest being 'Renderosity'.
Making (or buying or downloading freebies) 3D models and posing them in a 3D scene, then using a 'camera' in that scene to render photo-real 2D images is becoming a popular art form. The leading products are 'Poser' for human and animal figures and 'Vue 5 Infinite' for scene staging, lighting, vegetation, water, terrain, atmosphere, etc., etc. You can literally 'create worlds'.
In this type of work, Photoshop is used more for creating textures to apply to your models, grayscale bitmaps to act as height controls for terrains or control ecosystem areas, post-processing of images and such. But Photoshop (or equal) is an indespensible part of the digital artists toolkit.
Also, digital cameras are used to gather real-world textures. Here again Photoshop is the tool of choice.
Yes, many digital artists use digital tablets - they don't cost much and are more accurate and feel a lot better than a mouse for drawing. Dual monitors are also popular - one for your program and another for the resulting image. Strangely, stereo viewing has not caught on, although it's now inexpensive and very helpful in viewing complex 3D 'meshes' in 3D modeling.
Most digital artists get their visual ideas from imagination or from other artists, art history, written fiction, movies, dreams, etc. They usually do web research of subject matter and gather reference photos, then make paper and pencil 'concept' sketches, then make (or acquire) 3D models (if their images are model-based) and go from there.
A critical skill for any artist is learning to observe the visual world around them. Most people have forgotten how to look deeply and keenly (as they probably did as children) and merely glance at everything.
All the visual pollution, advertising, media, etc. has taught us to filter out much of what we perceive visually, so some conscious work is usually needed to get back to keen observation.
By practicing such 'seeing', one can learn a great deal about light, lighting, form, texture and so forth, from their daily surroundings. Doing photography is also a help in this.
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