Watch the bottle on this desk and you learn the studio’s whole method. The ink ribbon swirls constantly — that is its beauty — but it swirls inside glass that never changes shape. A character in a long series needs the same arrangement: everything about the work may flow, except the five lines that define her.
Those lines live on her inkstream card, in fixed order. Age — a plain number. Hair — colour, length and one habitual style. Build — two or three words. Face — one or two enduring details. Signature — the detail that survives a tight crop. The card is pasted word for word at the head of every prompt; below it, the day’s line — outfit, room, hour, light — is free to swirl as much as the sitting wants.
Redescribing her at every job is the opposite arrangement: glass that wobbles while the ink is asked to hold still. By frame nine the series shows a family of near-relatives instead of one woman, and no finishing tool can pour them back into a single shape.
Fix the glass. Let everything else flow. The bottle on the desk has been demonstrating the principle all along.