Too brief to get anything down but a scribble, the roughest mass of a body in space. Then came the longer poses. This is when you started to take in the person—the real person, the real body. Like ...

Alida Pepper was staring down depression. Stuck in her apartment in San Francisco, she worried that all the plans she’d made were about to unravel. For months, Pepper, a full-time life drawing model, ...