The sea outside a breakwater never repeats itself, and a good series should not either. The mistake is changing the wrong layer. Makers who tire of a series tend to alter the woman — a new hairstyle, a softened face — when everything they actually wanted was a change of weather.
This desk changes weather on a schedule. A run of sittings shares one tide: one setting family, one light, one wardrobe palette, so the frames sit together like a single evening’s sea. The next run changes all of it — a different room, a different hour, a different palette — while her five lines are pasted word for word, untouched, under the same lamp.
Keep a short tide record beside the card: the changing lines used, the frames kept, the frame that fronts the run. When a run disappoints, the record says whether the weather or the light was at fault — and it is almost always the weather, which costs nothing but imagination to change.
Let the tides do the variety. The light, and the lady, stay exactly where they were.