@Jessie Nice, and glad you had fun.
Painting is a great relaxing hobby, and can lead to extra money or a career too. I enjoy both oil and acrylic painting, but in my various university classes I can tell you they know how to zap the joy out of it.
A nice alternative to costly paints, brushes, canvas, etc is software and a simple graphics tablet. Once I started freelance illustration having the work digital solved many headaches, and not worrying about the expensive paints I could try more ideas too.
Examples are free programs such as
Krita and
Paint.net, and are the better free options. Of course paid ones such as
ArtRage and
Painter are even better (depending on your workflow and style). If your into drawing too the best of both worlds I found is
Clip Studio Paint Pro (which does 3D interactive overlays for anatomy work that can be priceless), and is awesome for inking work like traditional pen nibs and ink.
For that matter editors such as Photoshop (or PS Elements) or
GIMP (free) with custom brushes and tool setup can simulate a painter effect too. While I own all those programs I mention and tried them for many projects/hours, I tend to use
ArtRage just for fun painting, and
Clip Studio Paint Pro for business projects. Unless of course it is vector art then Illustrator or
Inkscape (free) are the go to programs.
While I've seen a few artists use only a mouse to draw/paint, most use a graphics tablet. I've owned various branded ones, and while
Wacom is the standard (if not highly overpriced) - alternatives like the ones from
Monoprice are great. I still use one I purchased from Monoprice over 5 years later, while the Wacom I originally had died a few years after buying it. Just the replacement Wacom stylus (pen) to possibly fix it cost double the entire tablet bundle I got from Monoprice.