@gene83 Don't chop the image up by only reading part of it! dd the whole card, and then use xz or pxz to compress the resulting image. That is the main reason the images are so small - the initial partition size is small (and resized to expand to the full card on first boot) and empty space is compressed. ayufan uses xz to compress, raspberry pi folks use zip.
@Ricky Firstly just note that Artful is probably not the prefered image if you want the most reliable and tested image... xenial is the prefered one (LTS release so will receive updates for a while / has been most rigorously tested). I haven't used that particular one yet (0.5.15?), but I would expect something may need changing or tweaking in /etc/network/interfaces or /etc/network/interfaces/interfaces.d/ to suit your network setup.
@Ricky Firstly just note that Artful is probably not the prefered image if you want the most reliable and tested image... xenial is the prefered one (LTS release so will receive updates for a while / has been most rigorously tested). I haven't used that particular one yet (0.5.15?), but I would expect something may need changing or tweaking in /etc/network/interfaces or /etc/network/interfaces/interfaces.d/ to suit your network setup.