The Photographer’s Gallery is tucked away in a cozy nook of London’s Soho. It's a pretty good place to visit as an escape from city. I remember being particularly distracted by a display of Found magazine's weird and wonderful submissions.

Here’s the thing. The Gallery is closing its doors until August 2011. But don’t despair for lack of distraction around the city. They’re running a competition in collaboration with photographers Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren who wrote Street Photography Now. Every week a leading photographer will give an instruction, and you’ve 6 days to upload your photo responding to the direction onto the project’s Flickr page.

The first quote is “If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it’s a street photograph.” The competition begins on 1^st October. Check the project site for more information on specifics (and prizes!).

I remember reading somewhere that every magazine is its own world and you should read a new one every month to keep your mind fresh. I can't remember where I read it, and I've probably mangled the quote horribly. Sorry if that was you. But it stuck with me as good advice.

The Stack service helps you do exactly that. It's for magazine-lovers and curious people of every hue. You sign up, and they send you a different magazine at random from their collection every month.

So, as the title suggested, Oh Comely is now part of this rather wonderful service. You can read their interview with Des here.

Good news everybody - the new compilation from Young and Lost Club is out! To celebrate five years (and over 50 songs) of their record label, founders Sara and Nadia have put together this nifty two-disc set for the indie singles connoisseur. The 35-song retrospective includes treasured tracks from a host of the label's bands, including Vincent Vincent and the Villains, Good Shoes, Pull Tiger Tail, Noah and the Whale, Bombay Bicycle Club, Lord Auch, Planet Earth, Ou Est Le Swimming Pool, Othello Woolf and Johnny Flynn. You can buy the compilation from their website and other good music retailers.

Now, usually 5th birthday parties bring to mind Disney-themed ice cream cakes and the occasional game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, but on this occasion it's a different kind of soiree entirely. The label is throwing an all-night party on the 9th of October at new Shoreditch venue XOYO, with live performances from Noah & The Whale, Ex Lovers, Planet Earth and Othello Wolf. There'll also be DJ sets from White Lies, Fnord, Egyptian Hip Hop, Chess Club, Gwilym Gold, Pull Tiger Tail, Joe Lean, Goodbye Mother, Lambrini Girls, Sunderbans, Adventure Playground, Abeano, Semifinalists, Hit Club. Yes folks, it's going to be a corker of a show.

Due to overwhelming popularity, pre-show tickets have now sold out but there will be a small amount of tickets available on the door for £12 (£5 after midnight).

Don't be too glum if you missed out. The lovely ladies from YALC have given us a pair of tickets for the show to give away to our readers! To be in the running, simply email [email protected] (with "YALC" in the subject line) and tell us something that you lost when you were young. The competition closes on the 1st of October.

Given that an umbrella and a bag of cashews managed to make its way through the postal service, we were sad to discover that one of our featured products for the last issue never quite managed to find its way to us.

Kayleigh O'Mara, a talented illustrator and from Leeds had kindly given us some of her lovely cat and rabbit button badges to give away for issue two, but which somehow got lost en-route to the office. However, proving the old adage that cats have nine lives, we are happy to say that they have made their way here!

Kayleigh has always loved drawing and had a keen interest in art, craft and design, so when she found out that people draw and get paid for it, "I knew it was the job for me."

She has recently graduated from the Northern School of Design, and is now settling down into a new home in Leeds where she is working and pursuing her hand-drawn dreams on the side by making badges, cards and zines and trying to attend as many fairs and craft events, as possible, although is hoping to eventually be able to draw all day and get paid enough to live on.

Amongst her favourite artists and illustrators are Julia Pott, Gemma Correll, Martin O'Niell and Debbie Greenaway- who she names as being the one to get her through her 'I can't do it!' moments whilst studying. She has shown work at Foyles Gallery in London and at The Cube in Manchester, and was highly commended in the Macmillan Book Prize Competition for her two children's books. If you would like to see more of her lovely things, then she can also be found on her blog.

We have 10 badges to give away to Oh Comely readers. If you'd like to be in with a chance of winning one, then just email [email protected] by the end of the weekend. Tell us your favourite cat story, and five will win a pair of these lucky little badges!

Here's a lovely project. Jemma Foster has written and illustrated a collection of short stories and had them handmade in Buenos Aires from recycled cardboard. The cardboard is bought from the city's cartoneros, cardboard pickers who make a living collecting it from the streets.

The best bit is that for every book she sells in the UK, one will go to Abuelas Cuentacuentos. They're also known as 'story-telling grandmothers', and they're a charity who send elderly volunteers to the poorest parts of Argentina to read to children who otherwise wouldn't have a story read to them. 

The launch is on Wednesday in London, and the details are here. 

There's so much to love about the work of London-based animator, Julia Pott. I first came across Julia with her clip for White Corolla by Casiotone For The Painfully Alone.

Her illustrative style has a noticeably hand-drawn and collagey feel. The films themselves revolve around the sweetly poignant, nostalgic stories of the almost-exclusively animal characters. They are delicately anthropomorphized, with Pott animating over the interviews of real people, evoking a comparison to Aardman's Creature Comforts. There's something different about Pott's work, however. It manages to be soft and surreal at the same time; the animals cute but disjointed and misshapen. Have a look at her beautiful film ‘Howard', which she made while studying at the Royal College of Art.

You can find Julia at her website and more films on her Vimeo page.

Eagle-eyed readers of issue two would have noticed that we are running a disposable camera project. Plan part one: Get a bunch of disposable cameras, arm our readers with them, and send them out into the big wide world. Part two: See what happens!

Well, consider part one accomplished - so many of you wrote to us asking for cameras that we've now completely run out. Just to be fair, we picked our happy snappers at random.

All the disposable cameras are now whizzing their way across the country, so all we have to do is wait and see what comes back. You'll be able to see the results in our next issue, out on October 21st.

Somedays the V&A seems like a garden of earthly delights, full of objects and curiosities that vie for your attention. I've been meaning to visit their Illustration Award display for a while. Making my way through the museum rooms, there were distractions aplenty. Jack Milroy’s prickly book-sculpture the Librarian’s Garden, for example, sapped my attention. 

The annual V&A Illustration Award runs various categories, from book cover and editorial work, to a prize for a student illustrator. Sarah Carr’s woodcuts for the book How to Drink won the book art category. They made up in sheer brilliance for the cup of coffee I’d missed out on earlier in the morning. Below is her piece for the expresso book page. 

Hanshen Gu and Frank Laws were the two finalists for the student award. Hanshen seems an obsessive sketcher, filling his pages with pattern and fantasy. Like this drawing, part of a series titled How Transport Destroys My Life. 

Frank Laws' painted works are a world apart. He makes intimate observations on city life.

Check out the show if you’re around. Although it’s a shame that none of the original works are displayed, only digital prints of the originals. If you can't make it, the V&A website site gives you a fuller picture of the diversity of this brilliant competition.