How to get rid of useless oil pastels

I still had this old set of very hard oil pastels and I did not know what exactly to do with them. For painting with OPs I clearly prefer artist quality oil pastel sticks that are much softer. So what to do with these hard and waxy pastels?

 It was this morning that I realized, that slightly melting them in a flame and smearing them all over a piece of paper is an option, too :).
 And it creates very nice impasto effects as you can see here:
  

“What Are Inchies?” or “The Little Seahorse”

Well, I’ve heard of inchies before. I knew them to be a certain patchwork style in which inch sized fabric squares of different colors were sewed together to a kind of mosaic. However what I did not know was that artists adopted this technique for creating little painted mosaics and collages. So I just had to try it out 🙂 .

For this one I cut out some inchies from a magazine (the only criteria has been that it had to have some green color somewhere), then I pasted nine of them on a larger piece of tinted paper. I tried to use some solvent on the pictures to bleach them a little bit, but it did not work out well for me. The negative space between some of the inchies reminded me of the shape of a seahorse, so I took a white gel pen and added the contours of the seahorse and some air bubbles. Et voilà!