how to make scroll saw pattern portrait

This probably isn't the best place to get that kind of question answered.

But if you can tell me what a scroll saw pattern looks like, I might know of a tutorial.

Thank you very much Brynn. It looks like a picture negative. If you go to YouTube and look at portrait scroll saw pattern usually done in Corel Draw.

SIGH!

Ok, I searched "scroll saw pattern" (although not on yt). It looks like you want to take someone's portrait photo, and draw around various features, highlights and shadows, so that in the end, you cut that out of a thin piece of wood, and it looks like the person in the photo.

I would suggest looking into Inkscape's Trace Bitmap. That tool is intended to convert raster images to vector. Although it can't convert most photos precisely, it should work very well for this purpose.

File menu > Import, to import the photo
Path menu > Trace Bitmap

Please see the manual for info on how to use Trace Bitmap. It's not necessarily very intuitive. You'll probably want to do a multiple scan trace (although maybe not, you'll have to play with it). The trace engine will produce either a single path which you can....saw along, I guess, or several paths, which I'm guessing you'll want to combine. You'll likely have to fine tune the results using node editing.