I mostly used the mouths from www.animationtoolkit.co.uk , which now come pre cut on the sticker paper. Mine did not and so I cut out a lot of small pieces…haha. I really like the set, but found that I wanted to have a few more shapes. To be honest they probably weren’t really necessary. I have been messing around with a program called Anime Studio Pro and found it a perfect resource for what I needed with these mouths. The program is mainly for doing hybrid 2D animation, where you use bones and layer rigging to manipulate vector art. Here is how I made some extra shapes:
1) I scanned the animationtoolkit mouth sheet into the computer and loaded it as a layer in Anime Studio (the shapes on the left are the scanned ones)
2) In Anime Studio I made a mouth rig based on the scanned shapes. It’s basically using layers and a mask. There are 4 layers: upper teeth, lower teeth, tongue, and mouth. Once the rig is made I can then move the points around and make any shape I want. In the picture each mouth is a full version of the mouth rig. You can see in the layers listed at the bottom right, they are just duplicates. I duplicated them so when I render out the jpg frame and print I will have a few copies to cut out. I printed on regular inkjet sticker paper. In the future I may make my own full set of mouths from scratch using this technique.
Here is a pic of the shapes being used to animate a scene:
I made a simple video that shows a bit better on how I accomplished it:
