You may like to have a look at a picture show we created yesterday which shows a dozen examples of Look and Learn covers, followed – for comparison – by the original artwork. It is quite interesting to see not only the quality of the original artwork, but how, in some cases, pictures have been cropped for use as magazine covers. If this type of picture show is of interest to people, let us know (in the comments below) and we will do more of them. In all, we have the artwork to a couple of hundred Look and Learn covers.

It is not clear who nowadays would want an illustration of yaks, but I doubt whether there are many finer illustrations extant of these wonderful beasts of burden. The artist is sadly unknown.

This year we chose this picture of Father Christmas on a skidoo as our Christmas card which was sent to all subscribers to the best of Look and Learn. We have just created a Christmas picture show which includes it and two dozen other seasonal images for your pleasure. Remember that, if you click on any of the pictures, you can send them as an e-card.

With Christmas trees in London now being put up earlier and earlier, I hope we will be excused this charming illustration from the Dick and Dolly series in Playhour. The artist is Harold McCready. Incidentally, we have now added a wonderful new feature to all the images in both our Picture Library and the Children’s Competition Library, which allows you to order bespoke greetings cards, postcards and so forth. Simply click on the image (to enlarge it) and then click on the option “Buy cards”.

We were lucky recently to find a transparency of this wonderful picture by Angus McBride in a collection of transparencies given to us by the Illustration Art Gallery. The picture was originally used on the cover of Look and Learn issue no 417.

It is difficult to encapsulate an entire nursery rhyme in a single picture. This picture, by an unknown artist, achieves this objective effortlessly.

Flying  is one of the staples of nursery art. Few pictures of this kind are as charming as this illustration by Philip Mendoza.

So as to increase the number of licensable images in our Picture Library we have created a new category called “retouched images” (these can be identified by file names which start with the letter “B”). These images are scans of pages from magazines, which we have digitally retouched using Photoshop and from which we have usually removed the text. Here is a retouched version of the cover of the first issue of Ranger magazine.