Turning Pictures Into "Engravings" Using Photoshop

Here in Canada ( in the land up north ) there is a newspaper called the "National Post". Each major journalist had a portrait engraving made and the engraving appears next to their column. This is cool, but there are a lot of engravings to make - couldn't we use the computer to simplify making engravings?

Part 1 - Get a picture, grayscale it, clean it up

First find a good picture portrait of a person. In this case its comrade Lenin - father of all nations. Grayscale the picture by going to IMAGE->MODE->GRAYSCALE. Cut off all excess details in the background with the lasso tool ( it doesn't have to be perfect though ). Increase the contrast ( IMAGE->ADJUST->BRIGHTNESS/CONTRAST ).

Part 2 - Create three patterns

Engravings feature variations in the thickness of the lines which make up the engraving - in darker regions the line thickens. We will create three patterns to create lines of different thicknesses, we will then layer them on top of each other to simulate a single line with varying thickness. Lets create them first. Create a new document which is one pixel wide and four pixels tall, it should have a transparent background. Zoom in and using the pencil tool fill in the top pixel in black, then go to SELECT->ALL and to EDIT->DEFINE PATTERN, call this first pattern "one". For the next pattern fill in the second pixel from the top as well, follow above instructions and call it "two". For the third pattern fill in the third pixel from the top - call it "three". The three patterns should look like the below diagram showing the pixel colors ( white being transparent ).