Jamie Tablason: Big Screen to Big Waves

The story and career of a children’s book illustrator and adjunct professor at Long Beach State University.

by Andres Leon

Jamie Tablason is an adjunct instructor for the art department at Long Beach State University. She teaches illustration classes while also being a children's book illustrator.

A true kid of the '90s, Tablason was raised around the Disney animated films. The first movie she saw in theaters was “The Little Mermaid” in 1989 and this heavily inspired her to draw anytime she could. She would express herself artistically at any given time, drawing the Stussy S’s in her school notebooks.

“As a kid, I wanted to be an animator. I wanted to get into the movie industry and just, went crazy drawing,” Tablason shared. “I was the kid that was copying VHS covers… just being a kid in the ‘90s growing up with all that pop culture.”

Tablason attended Mayfair High School and was a part of the newly started art academy program where she had various in-depth art classes. This helped her get a head start with her development of art skills.

“I was very privileged to be able to go to a high school that had an art academy. They had digital painting classes, animation classes [and] life drawing classes. That really helped me just go crazy with the start of my little art career,” she said.

Throughout her college career, she was interested in entering the animation industry. More specifically, she wanted to storyboard for movies and utilize sequential imagery for storytelling.

“It wasn’t until my last semester where I really started to get into the idea of doing children’s books,” Tablason said.

Illustration by Jamie Tablason

The first book she illustrated was an opportunity she got through a friend of a friend, of a professor. This experience sparked her newfound interest in children’s illustration, pulling her attention away from the animation industry.

“I just did that one book and it kind of led to other things down the road. That person got [the book] self-published on Amazon and other publishers saw it. I’ve just been fortunate from that one book back in the day,” Tablason said.

That book was a children’s story based in Hawaii and was well-received across the islands, being carried in several souvenir shops. Since then, she has continued to illustrate more books based around the region and a wide variety of other children’s books.

Tablason’s success in illustration is remarkable given the state of women’s employment in the art industry. Fortunately, she has not faced the discrimination that many women artists do today in the competitive job market.

According to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, while women earn 70% of bachelor of fine arts and 65–75% of master of fine arts degrees in the U.S., only 46% of working artists (across all arts disciplines) are women.

“I don’t feel like I’ve experienced any discrimination,” Tablason said. “If anything, I feel like I get hired on at certain companies because I’m a woman. I bring a unique perspective, perhaps, [but] I don’t ever think of myself as a woman artist. I’m an illustrator first.”

To aspiring artists in the field, Tablason leaves her final thoughts to them.

“For artists, do what you love. Make things you enjoy making and enjoy seeing. People will appreciate that authenticity and will recognize that,” Tablason said. “It’ll help you form an audience and I mean that goes for anything, any career.”