James Dulin was a Kansas City, Missouri native, born October 24, 1883 to James Everett Dulin and his wife Lillian H. Hagerty, both Illinois transplants. He was the oldest of two boys, including his much younger brother Everett V. Dulin (1/1899). James was living in the same place as many fine ragtime composers like Charles N. Daniels and Charles L. Johnson, the latter of for which he eventually created some covers. Before 1900, however, the family had moved down to Springfield, Missouri. One of Dulin's first jobs at 16 was as a clerk in the local railroad office in Springfield while he was finishing school. He was listed in that capacity in the 1900 census, with his father shown as a railroad engineer.

On July 15, 1909, James married Michigan native Adah Dorothy Donaldson, who was also a fine artist working for a Kansas City paper. For the 1910 census Adah was living in a boarding house in Kansas City, but James was not found in the listing, possibly because he had gone out on the road to look for a better work situation. The couple moved to Chicago, Illinois, later that year. Dulin started producing sheet music covers and other art from his own studio in Illinois in late 1910. Dorothy was soon working as a staff artist for the Chicago Tribune. Among her specialties were fashion drawings, for which her reputation would grow into the 1930s. She also contributed some sheet music cover art during her career, including some joint efforst like I Love You Dear. Both of them were utilized by F.J.A. Forster Music in Chicago and Whitney Warner Publishing in Detroit.

Enlisted for service during World War I, James so enjoyed France that after the war he moved his art studio there along with a printing business, and the Dulins spent a lot of time in Europe throughout the 1920s. In 1923, James taught illustration classes for the summer school of the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. While there he created many fine graphics for a number of French organizations and even engaged in book illustration. Dorothy was engaged in doing paintings and drawings for fairy tale books, a skill that brought great demand for her work. Throughout the decade he maintained a residence in Illinois. Records also show a couple of trips to and from France in the 1920s, and even a 1930 trip to Shanghai, China, so he was also a seasoned traveler. However, on one of those trips it appears that he brought home a different wife, French-born Renée, some 23 years his junior. They subsequently had two children, Francis (1932) and Jacques (1935), both born in Ohio. In 1931 the Dulins re-established themselves permanently in the U.S., obviously having lived in Ohio, and possibly having resided in Springfield, Missouri for a while, where James continued to do music covers and other commercial art through the mid-1950s. His 1942 draft record showed him as employed by the Carl Gorn Printing Company in Chicago. He listed his brother as living in New Jersey and working as an MD.

While James' earlier works referenced Dulin Studios, he later signed his works with a vertical Jamie, sometimes unobtrusively hidden within the image in the manner of Al Hirschfeld. It was reported that as late as the 1950s Dulin was receiving perhaps $25 per cover, and often created many images for one piece to give the publisher something to choose from. He was frustrated with the non-artistic turn that covers had taken, moving to personalities and photographs with only some abstracts surrounding them. James would often not know the names of the pieces he was commissioned to draw for, so would leave nonsense titles in place which the publisher would replace. The family remembers one in particular called Ixio Pontine. Other than payment for the art, he rarely received even a courtesy copy of the sheet, and his original artwork was usually kept by the publisher. Having established himself in Sarasota, Florida in the late 1940s, James joined the faculty of the Ringling School of Art, which was associated with the famous Ringling Brothers Circus family. There he taught drawing and painting. The 1950 enumeration showed James, Renée, and their two sons in Sarasota, with James as instructor at an art school, likely the Barnum organization. James Dulin died in June of 1958 in Sarasota. He is buried in Springfield, Missouri.

In spite of the detail present in much of Dulin's work, his images remain uncluttered and to the point. Color use was kept to a simple palette (easier for printers), and each element had a clear purpose within the image, whether background or foreground. Since many of his later works went unsigned to avoid a particular legal conflict of interpretation or authorship, an accounting of his full body of covers is difficult at best.