It's been three years since I went and posted my version of an interesting carrier conversion I saw- the cancelled battleship USS Washington, (of the Colorado class and not Solomon islands fame), converted to a CV, some nebulous amount of time after work had begun on the Lexington class. The original drawing used a cut and paste of the Yorktown's superstructure, which bothered me as clearly, by the time the Yorktown's are in service the window for conversion of this ship has long closed. So I went and made a new version whose purpose was to imitate the more contemporary Lexingtons as closely as possible.
For a while that was it, but recently I began work on drawing one of the USN's pre-Lexington carrier studies, which will get it's own thread soon enough. But it also taught me a lot about USN carrier building at the time, and about carrier drawing in general. And coming back to the improved Washington conversion, I realized there was a lot that was still wrong with it. It also occurred to me that being a remake of a kitbash of two different artists drawings, both of which by now are throroughly obsolete, which mean the style both had some odd choices and some...interesting conflicts, in terms of how shape was represented, shading, details. So I came back to it with three years of improvement in my skills and all that I'd learned about carriers, to bring you this high-effort monstrosity.
![[ img ]](https://i.imgur.com/XH8UFPK.png)
In addition to huge sweeping improvements in the style, like the hull shading, the wealth of small details in the gun bays and on the hangar sides, I also materially improved things like shortening the funnel, reworking the bow and stern shape to be more realistic to contemporary designs, and added contours for hull bulges. I think now I've produced the most high quality, realistic portrayal of a Colorado class carrier conversion to date, an achievement of dubious honor since it's far from the best hull for a carrier conversion out there and certainly not one of the most exciting historical what-ifs. But if you're going to do something, do it right.
Edit: Nearly forgot to mention the more era-appropriate Martin T3Ms and the additional draft from ballast and bulges.