Where can i find...

the programs Blizzard art tools, and WC3 model editor? im JUST starting out with skinning units and such, amd a friend pointed me in the right direction, but failed any real specifics beyond those 2 programs... so any help would be great!

You do not really need art tools to make skins, but models, and from scratch and you'll need 3dsmax knowledge.

You should try getting for example wc3 image extractor II or war3 viewer to extract the blp files/ convert them to tga and back to blp.