These nesting dolls are highly professional and original, created in good taste and a variety of themes. The techniques used are also diverse - from dab painting to other artistic devices like icon painting. The gilded domed monastery complex is still a feast for the visitor's eyes. Within these grand buildings there exists a toy museum, opened in 1918 and filled with evolutionary examples of the nesting doll, from peasant women to noble ladies and hussars. Nearby, vendors in an open market sell a wide variety of matryushkas to tourists and natives alike.
Merchants offer the traditional dolls, as well as, ones with exquisite icon paintings on the sides.
Today the designs continue to be individualistic with each artist's imagination, adding historical, ethnic, fairy tale or animal patterns to the dolls' decoration. Some American shops offer upward of 4000 different styles. Most of the traditional designs come from villages in the European part of Russia, around Moscow. Each style inherits its name from the area it which it originated. Polkhovsky Maiden and Krutets in the Nizhni Novgorod region doll designs are more massive and less graceful with larger patterns than other models.