Animating mouths

The toughest part about making animations, in my opinion,
Is to put the detail into the characters movements....more specifically making them talk. To make the character talk requires precise movements of lips in order to make shapes. Common shapes of the mouth can be easily recognized simply by looking at yourself in the mirror and pronouncing words very slowly.

You can take the cartoon illustrated above. If we were using this as a template for a cartoon we are going to make we would have to take mouth shapes into consideration.
Take the word "sting" in contrast to the word "lonely". Looking at the movements of your mouth while saying these words can show you the types of shapes you might need to animate. There are nice cheat sheets around the internet to show you some templates of mouth sheets. Check this one out:

You can see with these mouths that the tongue and the lips play a huge part in making the talking realistic. It is basically the hardest part. When animating you are usually animating around audio. Meaning the audio comes first.... you have to animate what the character says and make it look realistic..

I suppose this is my post explaining how I am going to get back into animation :) found all my old character concepts.... so I'll be making a new cartoon soon.