Born in Redlands, California. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, the Art Students League in New York, and the American Academy of Fontainebleau in France. Around 1930 he returned to teach at Chouinard Art Institute, where his innovative watercolor painting developed into what is known as the California Style. Throughout the early 1930s he continued teaching and painting. Soon his paintings were exhibited throughout the United States, receiving wide acclaim and numerous awards. By 1935, he was teaching color theory at Walt Disney Studios and working on animated features such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Fantasia.

In the mid-1940s, Dike left Disney to teach and paint full time. He and fellow artist Rex Brandt formed the Brand-Dike Summer School of Painting in Corona del Mar. Dike taught there in the summer and at the Chouinard Art Institute during the school year. As a young child his parents took him to the Newport Beach area, where he began his love of the costal scenes. In 1944 Arthur Millier, a famed Los Angeles art critic, described Dike’s love of Newport Beach as follows:

One of Dike’s favorite painting rounds is Newport Bay, alive with sails. In his pictures one often glimpses its breezy activity through the window of some seaside cottage where holidaymakers relax in the beach air. He has the happy faculty of combining effects of light on sea and shore, which are both beautiful and dramatic, with humorous observations which give life and lightness to his pictures.