Oh hi!
Well since I'm the first to comment I believe a welcome to DA is in order here so....
Welcome to DA!
and let's not forget
I saw that you asked in one of the MLP groups that I'm not actually a part of XD about a free art program
Well it depends on what your trying to do. I myself at the moment have been doing quite a few vectors which is a little different from ordinary digital art. For those I use a program called Inkscape
[link]If your interested in trying vectors then I'd say take a look at some of these
[link]I haven't done a lot of normal digital art in a while because the laptop I'm using is tiny and the screen's too small to do any of that kind of thing. Plus I used to use Photoshop which I don't have anymore... but if you want to do any of that stuff there's Gimp
[link]and Paint.net
[link]YouTube has some nice tutorials for drawing ponies if I remember correctly
Hope this helps