On the making of Hands Like Daddy's

We sat down with Ron Smith in the Cordis Studio workroom, the illustration boards still up on the wall, to ask how the first book of the house actually got made. He was, as usual, more interested in talking about the dads than about himself. What follows is an excerpt from that conversation.

Cordis Studio: Start at the beginning. Where did Hands Like Daddy's come from?

Ron Smith: It came from a line, not a plan. "Hands like Daddy's." I had it in my head for a long time before there were any pages. I grew up around men whose hands told you exactly what they did for a living, and I wanted a book where a kid looks at his own small hands and sees the future in them. Once I had the refrain, the rest of the book was just deciding which hands to show.

Cordis Studio: And you landed on six trades.

Ron Smith: Six. The carpenter, the plumber, the electrician, the roofer, the HVAC tech, and the mason. I argued with myself about that list for weeks. Every trade I left out felt like leaving out somebody's dad. But six is what the page-count and the rhythm would hold, and those six let you build a whole house between them, which is the quiet point of the book.

I wanted a book where a kid looks at his own small hands and sees the future in them.

Cordis Studio: The refrain repeats with each trade. Was that always the structure?

Ron Smith: From the first draft. A small child wants the thing to come back around. "Hands like Daddy's" is the part they say with you by the third reading, and then it's theirs. The illustration team built the whole visual rhythm around that return — same framing on the boy's hands each time, so the repetition is something you see as much as hear.

Cordis Studio: And the dedication.

Ron Smith: To my four nephews. I won't pretend otherwise — I wrote it for them first, and everyone else got invited in afterward. That's usually the right order.