Comics were not Frank Bellamy's
first love. An admirer of the
English watercolourist Sir
William Russell Flint and
favouring a classic approach to
art  he continued to produce
non-commercial work whenever
he could make time.   

Frank also taught art classes  for
periods throughout his career
and honed his own drawing
abilities in the process.
As he continued to evolve, Frank experimented with using his
familiar pointillist technique to create images composed entirely
from the highlights of a form, on dark paper without any other
rendering or contrast.

These two studies of a railway station show examples of how Frank
defined structure from highlights alone.
Nancy recalls that Frank also developed
a method of distressing paper so that it
had the appearance of old leather
Frank used two of his passions as subject
matter for these artistic experiments.
Bullfighting and Africa.

Nancy says  that Frank loved the romance
and glamour of the bullfight but was repulsed
by the actual event.









The glittering Matador  below is a good
example of the pointillistic  highlight
technique.
A curiosity. The Thunderbird Matador
image was created for a bullfighter the
Bellamy's befriended during a holiday in
Spain
Nancy has said this group of
sketches may have been drawn by
Frank at his class in the Studio Club
in Piccadilly around the same time
he was working on The Happy
Warrior.