Hi there! It's Thanksgiving week! Hope that everyone is having a wonderful long weekend.
As it's been a little while, I thought it was time to share some good news!
 ***I just opened my Etsy shop!!! www.etsy.com/shop/KraskiMira. Please visit and follow me!!

Gone Paleo Crazy!

Well, to break my "blog-writing-freeze" -  I am going to jump right into it! Indeed, I have gone a little Paleo crazy. These past few months have been difficult as I haven't been feeling too great. I've finally realized that I was making myself sick with the overload of dairy, gluten, and over-processed sugar I've been consuming in the recent years. With some support from my healthy hubby, I have bought myself the "Practical Paleo" addition a few weeks back and trying my best to stick with a healthy approach of eating and living.

I have been trying many of my own recipes and would love to share a recipe of my favorite guilt-free frozen treat : the chocolate covered banana popsicle!

Chocolate Coconut Covered Bananas - Chilled/ Frozen Treats!

• 4 bananas
• 2 organic dark chocolate gluten-free bars(best 70% or higher)
• 1/2 -3/4  cup coconut milk
• Unsweetened organic coconut flakes
• 8 popsicle sticks

Peel bananas and cut into halves (will be 8 total pieces).
Prepare dish with wax cookie sheet placed on top.
In a sauce pan, melt chocolate – mixing and combining with coconut milk (for about 1-2 min).
Insert popsicle sticks into banana pieces and dip bananas into chocolate, carefully using a spoon or spatula to cover all of the banana.
Carefully place chocolate covered banana onto wax sheet and sprinkle with coconut flakes.
Place bananas into freezer for an hour and serve (will be fresh and slightly chilled).
To freeze for a longer time period, move the banana popsicles into a plastic/glass container after they have cooled off and can easily be moved from the wax paper.
Enjoy!

Pinterest.

Hi!  Hope everyone has had a great week and is excited for the weekend to arrive : -) I am overly excited as the majority of my weekend will be spent relaxing and catching up on painting. I have finally created a Pinterest account and instantly became addicted to pinning.

You can find me on Pinterest as Marusia-ARTSY  through this link : www.pinterest.com/marusiaartsy.
I would love to share in the addicting experience of pinning with you!

Updates!

Happy Monday! As always the weekend swept by like an express Amtrak train – leaving no real time to unwind from life. Life is life, but life during the work week is always a battle at 5:30, especially on Monday mornings. Well, it has been a very long time since I have written and I miss it. I have been extremely busy with work, with side art projects on the weekends, and with life in general.

It is also time I share an image of my little home studio - it's not much but it's a start :-)

Today I got myself thinking about Marusia-ARTSY and decided it was time I put a little more effort into keeping this blog up-to-date. I am also looking into possible re-design of this blog and hope to start the process the following week! 

On another note, it was my 28th birthday last week. How quickly time flies. We blink and another month, season, year goes by...Well it ended up being a day of realization – realization that as the years pass, we get older and hopefully wiser. We also get close to that time when we look at our present lives and wonder if we are living them to the fullest. Whether we are happy where we are or unhappy. Is it possible to be both on occasion? It’s normal to be unhappy, but why should we settle for unhappy, when we could reach for happy? I know what it is to be happy but to be happy and fulfilled at the same time is a different story. In the midst of working out these thoughts - I realized that I am settling in some areas of my life and I am not typically a settler. We are here to live and reach for our dreams and goals. Sometimes we get pushed to the side and forget what those dreams are, or we don’t realize originally what those dreams actually are. Yet there comes a time when we overcome the obstacles and accomplish those goals. I have reached that part in my life when I want to reach higher and push harder  without being held back by the thoughts of a settler.

Hope you keep on visiting my little blog and following me in the midst of the challenges of life and my journey of creating happy art!

Love,
Marusia

And his name is...

... Sky. A glimpse into a custom painting for a friend.

   

Finished Projects.

These original paintings and reproduction prints will be available in my Etsy store - launching soon!!!

Owls.

I have a new fascination with owls or obsession as one might call it. I have always admired this specific creature of the night – mainly due to the mystery of the actual personality of the bird with the cryptic cries in the dark adding to the suspense. What secrets do these creatures hold? What do they witness when the world is asleep?  I have often wondered and thought about these questions and only associated owls with horror films and ghost stories. However, it is not until now that I’ve gained a new perspective toward these noble statuesque birds.

Recently, I have completed a project – an illustration of an owl as a gift to a close friend of mine. As this painting illustration is intended to be hung as wall décor for her nursery, I used bright hues and repeated fun patterns to create the fitting piece for the child’s room.

I cannot recall last time I had this much fun painting. While I was working on it, I could picture all kinds of different cute scenes involving owls – an array of different colors and stories swarming  its way into my mind and slowly nestling into my thoughts. I was gone in this world of “Owl-boro”. As a result, I decided that I wanted to create a series of  small nursery-oriented paintings of different scenes involving owls. I hope to incorporate some of my other subjects (hands and botanicals) into these artworks. Planning to start work on these sometime within the next month and surely, I will be posting photo updates on progress when possible. I really want to include this series in my Etsy shop which will be up and running in mid-summer.