What's the best way to get started with Blender these days? I'm mostly interested in making art and possibly even 3d printing some stuff (do these skills overlap at all?).
Donut tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0J27sf9N1Y&list=PLjEaoINr3z...As for 3d printing there are other software which is simpler if you need to do simpler things. But you can not go wrong in learning Blender for 3d printing as well.
I'd say that depends a lot on what you want to print. Some people might be able to use Blender for technical parts, but
for most people traditional CAD software would be the better choice here.
CAD is great when you want to make a nice parametric model that you can edit as requirements change. But for a simple one-off part, I can often whip one up in Blender in a third the time it would take me to dimension everything in a CAD sketch.