blender's beginner friendly enough for me to universally recommend it at this point - you might bounce off, or you might, like me, be a half-decent visual artist 3 years later!
it's ridiculous how easy it is to use now once you get the basics down. im a bad artist in general, so i mostly use it for editing existing models, but i can also whip up a simple prototyping model pretty quick too. awesome stuff
I was a big fan of blender, but the support for rendering on AMD GPUs is completely abismal. Nowadays you have to get an expensive Nvidia card to get good results.
aw, thought they'd finally sorted that recently - did get an Nvidia one for that reason a while back, which has been slightly annoying now I've finally switched to linux