Term 1 supplies

Welcome to the forums! The way i see it, photoshop is not really a requirement, there's is some classes that focus on some tools that photoshop has, but they can easily be skipped. Many people here on the forums don't use it for instance and there are plenty of drawing softwares out there, so pick what suits you best.

Krita (free) and Clip Studio Paint are commonly used as substitutes for most of the Digital Production content in Term 1.

Welcome to the forums! you can do the whole thing most likely in any digital art program.

For the parts that ally really need photoshop items (mainly only in term 1) you can use photopea (basically a free, online photoshop-like thingy): https://www.photopea.com/

For drawing, lots of people here use Krita (kinda fancy, fre,e and awesome) or clip studio paint (fancy, free, and awesome)

later on when you get to the 3D section, while Marc uses paid software, you can most likely do the same thing in Blender (free 3D app)

Hope that helps

So basically what everyone is saying so far.

I'd say depending what you want to get out of the course, you could even go traditional, but yeah, a lot of things here are focused on digital and everything is done on photoshop and zbrush.

Your alternatives are most commonly krita, clip studio paint and corel painter on computers and Procreate/clip studio on iPad. I'd say any of those apps are adequate but maybe consider subscribing to photoshop for the first month or two to give it a try if your budget allows (I got it for 10$ a month and it's what I'm mostly using)

You will need a graphics tablet and stylus of some sort for the digital work though, a mouse will really not cut it, so if you are still mousing it, I suggest saving and at least getting a cheap tablet or using pencil/pen for now

cheers!

Gotcha, then grab that pencil mate and hit it!

Cheers