Hey, I think you did a nice job simplifying your shapes. You're right that combining shapes will give you more options in your designs. Like your first rooster has a nice mix of triangles, squares and circles - you could try keeping the same variety in your Level 2 designs but just push one shape more heavily so that the overall impression is that of, say, a round character, with a big round silhouette, even though there might be some smaller triangles and squares within, instead of every single shape having to be a circle. Another thing I noticed is that even though you changed up the 3 basic shapes in your Level 2 designs, you kept the components of the faces the same size in each design. For example, with your hippos, most of them are roughly 2/3 eye window and 1/3 snout. You can change these proportions a lot, and try something more exaggerated like 1/5 eye window and 4/5 snout. Same goes for varying the size of the eyes, nostrils, etc. Also placement - you could place the ears on the sides, move the eyes down, etc. Re: lightweight paper, I haven't tried this with scans but when I take photos of thin paper and other drawings show through, an easy fix is to just place a few sheets of printer paper underneath the page you're taking a photo of. I imagine that could also work for scans?

Should have made my shadows as dark as yours! Looks great