Nancy Zieman had a very cute idea on one of her shows once that would work well for you.
It involved having a child draw a picture. The one she used on the show was a penguin. She then layered three pieces of fabric, one black, one white and one orange. (There must have been one more layer on top of them all, like blue to provide the background color.) She traced the picture onto the top piece of fabric, sewed through all layers around the lines and then, leaving a seam allowance, cut out inside the lines however many layers needed to get down to the right color for that portion of the picture. For instance for the penguin's orange beak, you cut through the top layer, the black layer, and the white layer to reveal the orange layer.
Not sure if this makes any sense, but it looked really cute, and not to difficult to make. The only thing, it seemed to me to use up a lot of fabric for one quilt block.
Maybe someone else here has a link to the idea somewhere, or can explain it better.