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Among the other vessels he has drawn are the USS North Carolina, the USS Essex, the IJN Musashi, the IJN Nagato and the IJN Kaga. He considers every element of the ship’s composition, down to its position in the water on a given day or the angle of a shadow.

Smith pores over reference materials-blueprints, photos and first-person accounts-to immerse himself in a ship’s structure and role in the war. ship, Smith’s attention to detail is an homage to the men who walked those decks, ate in those mess halls and slept in those bunks. Whether he’s recreating a Japanese or a U.S. “These men didn’t have gravestones-they got coordinates,” Smith says. Hearing that story prompted Smith’s obsession with naval tragedies, and every ship he has depicted since has been an act of commemoration. A cousin of Smith’s stepdad was one of the young sailors who died aboard the USS Astoria at the Battle of Savo Island in 1942. Growing up in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, he spent much of his childhood on the San Pedro and Wilmington docks with his grandfather, who worked as a hydrostatic welder repairing warships during World War II. A pipe fitter by day and historian by night, he employs pen, pencil and collage. He’s a self-taught artist, so skilled a draftsman that he can still replicate the diagram of the engine room of the vessel where he served. Smith comes from a long line of veterans and served in the Navy himself as a boiler room technician on an amphibious assault ship from 1981 to 1984. Over the past 15 years, Smith has dedicated himself to creating some of the world’s most intricate and evocative renderings of warships that fought in the Pacific theater in World War II. “When I feel I’ve captured the ship and its essence … enough for the crew of that ship to say, ‘OK, this representation is our ship,’ that’s when I get the tears,” he says. When JD Smith finished his drawing of the Indianapolis, in 2019, he took a drive past a burial ground for veterans in Los Angeles and wept thinking about those who had died on the ship.

For more than three days, sailors battled shark attacks, dehydration and salt poisoning. A few minutes past midnight on July 30, 1945, two Japanese torpedoes struck the 10,000-ton USS Indianapolis.

World of warships how to access space battle ships