The content based image retrieval (CBIR) technique is one of the most popular and evolving research areas of the digital image processing. The goal of CBIR is to extract visual content like colour, texture or shape, of an image automatically. This paper proposes an image retrieval method that uses colour and texture for feature extraction. This system uses the query by example model. The system allows user to choose the feature on the basis of which retrieval will take place. For the retrieval based on colour feature, RGB and HSV models are taken into consideration. Whereas for texture the GLCM is used for extracting the textural features which then goes into Vector Quantization phase to speed up the retrieval process.