Thanks for your message! I hear your concerns, and bear with me because it's the first time I tried to run a small contest for getting content into a game and also I am on on a small indie budget.
The animation frames do not have to be complex, I added a sample to the competition page at the bottom to clarify (see link below). So it could just be 4 frames and then repeat a few of them with an eye blink at the end. A lot of the animation, squeezing, stretching is done in code so should make it less time consuming for the artist! I wanted to keep the effort required to enter as low as possible which is why I done it this way, that way only the winner has to do a little extra.
http://www.learn-to-code-london.co.uk/blog/2016/04/12/design-a-game-character-art-competition/I don't anticipate many entries so as you are a freelance artist, I hope you do enter as I would love to see what you can come up with!
Best regards,
Alex