Tonight: Get your art on with a free open studio at the Art Students League of Denver

​Art is expensive. Between the paint and the clay and the canvases and the brushes -- to say nothing of the time it takes to create art -- it's no wonder artists are starving. Then again, perhaps the suffering builds character. But that doesn't mean that artists and aspiring artists shouldn't save a buck where they can, and tonight, they can. In conjunction with Denver Arts Week, the Art Students League of Denver, which sounds like a consortium of superheroes but isn't, is offering its weekly open studio session -- where the League provides the equipment and the model and you provide the creativity -- for free. All you have to do is show up.

Actually, you have to bring your own supplies, too -- paints, palettes, a chisel, whatever; the DASL invites people to use the model for whatever medium they wish. Monday's open-studio sessions are generally "long pose," meaning the model holds one pose for the session's entire three-hour length. Which is pretty impressive on its own.

The session starts tonight at 6:30 p.m. and lasts until 9:30 p.m.; it's free and open to anyone, but space is limited, so you should probably show up a little early. In the meantime, have a sandwich -- turns out you can afford one today.