Creator Corner: Author and Illustrator Todd Stewart
Welcome to Creator Corner, a blog series where we interview the creators of our recent and upcoming books. For this post, we interviewed Little Moments in a Big Universe author and illustrator Todd Stewart, whose book is publishing October 14, 2025!
Owlkids Books: Todd, how and why did you begin writing and illustrating children’s books?
Todd Stewart: Since I was a kid, I’ve always loved to create stories. I suppose I wrote my first picture book when I was 5. Entitled The Soccer Game, it was directly inspired by Dennis Lee’s poem The Hockey Game, from his book Alligator Pie. I loved this book as a kid, and the interplay between Dennis Lee’s text and Frank Neufeld’s illustrations in it, and Alligator Pie continues to have a profound impact on me as a writer and illustrator.
I come from the worlds of architecture and urban planning, and moved from these fields through book and magazine design back to my first love: illustration. The first children’s book I illustrated was See You Next Year, written by Toronto author Andrew Larsen, and published by Owlkids! At that time, my son was just starting to read picture books himself, and I leapt at the opportunity to illustrate a story I knew he would eventually be able to read. I’ve not looked back since, and consider children’s books to be my favorite of the projects I work on.
OKB: What was the inspiration for writing this book?
TS: Since I worked on my first picture book as an adult, I’ve wanted to illustrate a story set in outer space. I am a big fan of astronomy and science fiction; and I love drawing planets, stars, and the little bits that make up the universe. I began writing Little Moments around 5 years ago; my family had moved to Scotland for six months and we lived through the beginnings of the pandemic there (so I had a lot of time to work on it). And I think I was reflecting a lot on what it means to travel to a place that isn’t your home, and how to behave as a tourist or a visitor or a stranger, and how we as humans make connections with people who are different than ourselves in such places.
OKB: What themes or topics do you enjoy exploring in your illustrations? Is there a spread that you really enjoyed working on?
TS: I am inspired most by the natural world and landscapes of all sorts: forests, deserts, oceans, and outer space, as well as microscopic, underground, and imaginary landscapes. I enjoy every little component that makes up specific places and believe that the little details in a place’s plant and animal life are crucial in creating a believable, evocative setting to a story. So while I enjoyed drawing the spreads in Little Moments set in space, my favourite spreads are those where I’m creating the forest world and its alien plant and animal life, big and small.
OKB: What was the most enjoyable part of bringing this story to life? What was the most challenging part of the process?
TS: Little Moments is set on a fictional planet in a fictional solar system, and I enjoyed creating and mapping this solar system and all its planets and moons, all the while trying to respect the science that would govern such a place (as we understand them). For instance, the sun in this solar system is a binary red dwarf star, which emits a darker, redder light, and would certainly influence the plant life on the planet in different ways than how our sun acts on Earth. After some research, I learned that this planet’s plants would be darker, almost black, in order to capture as much of the sun’s light as possible. (Originally I had illustrated the plants to be reddish in colour, and had to change this!) I really enjoyed developing this world and its different life forms, and living in this imaginary world for long periods of time.
The most challenging part of this book was of a technical nature. When a book gets printed, especially on matte paper (as opposed to glossy paper), the illustrations tend to come out darker than they do when you see them on a screen. And because the illustrations in Little Moments are atmospheric and have lots of little dark shadowy corners and saturated colours, we took a lot of time making sure they would come out well once printed. A big thank you to the design and production staff at Owlkids who I know worked very hard to get the best out of my illustrations!
OKB: What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
TS: The original theme of the story, which hasn’t changed since the beginning, is about how incredibly vast the universe is, and how we as humans on our own little planet make up such a small part of it all. But at the same time, at a microscopic level, I believe everything in the universe is connected, we are all little pieces of the cosmos; the basic elements that make us up exist throughout the universe. I understand this interconnectedness to mean that no matter how small, our lives and actions are all part of the larger cosmos. All that we do matters, our actions count towards a collective story, the story of the universe. And of course the connections we make as individuals, the stories we tell together, and the work we do together and how we treat each other and our planet, is all part of this!
OKB: What’s an interesting fact people may not know about you?
TS: I do love to read and draw but I am also a very sporty person, I love both team and solitary sports and am fascinated by how our bodies behave and change through time. I played lots of sports as a kid. I was the captain of my high school football team and we went undefeated in my senior year! Football is now my least favorite sport and I don’t recommend it for anyone; but sports were, and still are, a big part of who I am.
Thank you so much Todd for taking the time to do this interview and creating a wonderful book! We hope readers enjoy Little Moments in a Big Universe as much as we did!
Grab your copy today!
