With our earlier discussion of how to address the illustration situation for the project, i thought drawing cartoonish bears maybe a good start. 

As you can see the process of maintaining the prominent features of the bear makes it recognizable(head, arms, body, etc). 

From that, i have also produced a cut-out illustration of the bear, my focus for this development was to have as much mobility in the character, so that animation can be done as quickly as possible.