After talking with my group more, they decided they wanted to try a more traditional Chinese art style for the characters. So I tried my best to redraw the designs I'd come up with in this newer style. Below you can see the results:

I actually found this quite difficult to do, since this style of drawing is so drastically different to my own art style, which is more cartoony. I used a lot of reference images that I found through research on google. I'm sure you can agree that these new designs don't quite look the same as the traditional Chinese style of drawing, but I tried simplifying it a little, so it would be easier to draw/animate in the future.