This book is part of a series on drawing. Some of the others are; Lifelike Animals, Beautiful Landscapes..the common feature with this series seems to be the medium is pencil: with graphite or coloured. This particular book is about drawing lifelike portraits in pencil. And Lance Richlin has a method which involved seven steps.
1. The lay-in which is really an oval with markers for hairline, bottom of nose etc.
2. Plumb lines which is really laying out the widths of facial features: eyes, nose, mouth etc
3. Volumes added..which is simple volumes like spheres, egg-shapes, cubes etc.
4.Edges, outlines and core shadows. (He's very negative about outline drawing )
5. Add tonal patterns
6. Finishing which is modifying the tonal values, softening edges and lines
7. Polishing with stubs and power puffs with powdered graphite and liberal use of kneadable erasers.
The results seem pretty good...assuming that you really want a good likeness. He has some basic instructions about drawing various body parts like; eyes, hair, mouth, noses etc. But there seems to be world of difference between stage 6 and 7 and he doesn't really give much away when it comes to polishing. And polishing seems to be the stage which turns a pencil sketch into a portrait. How do you actually DO it? There are some good tips there for handling things like teeth (They need to be carefully 'moulded/shaded' otherwise the face will look very toothy. There are also some tips for drawing babies, people of different races and older people. It seems that for something like portraiture, that people still look for a good likeness rather than something that shows the underlying character.
Maybe not one of the great books on drawing instruction but it does what it purports to do. I give it three stars. ( )