New Design for Wooden Toys

We are a publishing company who sells learning kits for kids. These kits contain special wooden toys, like trees (apple tree, fir) and animals(fox, crocodile, monkey). These toys are made out of plywood (about 4 – 5 mm thick) and have the same design on both sides. Our current toys are a bit old-fashioned, stemming from the 70s, so we want a fresher and more modern design for them. In general, the colors of our current toys are very plain and covering/opaque, whereas we would like them to have in a more lighter tone, ideally a bit translucent, so you can see the wood and its pattern slightly shine through. It is also important that such a design is actually applicable for printing on wood (not based on screen printing but rather on thermotransfer printing technology). Thus we need illustrations that can work as prototypes for future production of our wood toys. We have some animal figures, which have flexible/movable extremities. So kids can actually put them in different postures. Thus it has to be considered, that for production of the toys, arms, legs and body parts would need to be separate parts. The size of the figures should be about the same as the current figures, presented in the examples. We experienced that kids rather play with figures, that have a particular expression in/around their eyes (i.e. not only small dots or lines, perhaps some more details like pupils or little lines above or beneath). See attachment for details.