Another animation! Hope you’re not getting bored of these. I’m pretty much the main animator for the project that we are working on, so I’ll most likely be writing about animations until the end of the project.
This time I included a gif showing the process I use to create the animations, from sketch to finished.
I did happen to merge a couple of layers in the process of making the lineart it seems, as well as not separating the color-layers to one color per layer on all frames, so there are a couple of odds in the gif. Although slightly inconvenient if I would have to alter any of the colors at a later time, if the animation wouldn’t read very well for instance, it shouldn’t prove a very big problem.
Again I started by taking one of the frames from the enemy’s idle animation and using that as the base to build the animation from. This time though I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted the death animation to look like, other than that I wanted it to “splash out” into nothingness. So I started quickly sketching out a couple of suggestions where I tried a few things out, like if it should splash mainly to one side or fold onto itself. I did end up deciding on a rather “normal” splash, dispersing fairly equally in all directions and disappearing.
Then once I was happy with the sketch stage I followed my normal process, filling in the lines and moving on to coloration. The face, or mask, I copied from the idle animation and altered to make it break apart, just to maintain a coherent look through the death animation as well.
When it comes to animating water, there are a couple of things that perhaps you’d want to keep in mind. The first thing, this applies more to the idle and attack animations though since they had to fit together and loop, is that there has to be a coherent flow between the frames. Jumping or flipping water, or water that is completely still would surely look rather peculiar. I used rather circular motions to achieve this, to make the water spirit seem to be made out of flowing rather than stagnant water.
And the second is something that I think came rather naturally from using a rather cartoon-ish style in the project, surface tension. Water has a tendency to want to stick together, so rather than to make the water spirit just fade out or evaporate I wanted it to splash out into drops and then vanish. To me that would be both logical and fitting the art style that we chose.
Below is the gif of the process, hopefully it will be a little bit clearer how I went about things than just through text.
-EDIT-
Below are the gifs. A friend asked me to split the process-gif into several, one for each step, to make it a little bit clearer if you wanted to concentrate on one.
Step 1: Sketch
Step 2: Lineart
Step 3: Flat Color
Step 4: Highlights and Shadows
Geemu Burogu-! 
I am going to begin by saying that you have done a really good job on that animation! The animation is smooth and not as clunky as it easily becomes. You have not spared much expense with the frame count either, which I like. However, there is some minor jerking in a few areas, but that is barley noticeable and will hardly be a problem.
I think you really managed to make it look like water too, using the method you described. I actually never animated water myself, but I can imagine it might be quite difficult.
When it comes to you blog post, I think you did good, describing the process you went through making the animation, in detail. Sharing your thoughts regarding how to successfully animate believable water was also a nice addition, since it can help out readers such as myself.
However, it would be interesting to hear some more reflections regarding the difficulty of this particular task, and maybe some ideas on how it could be improved. or if you were completely satisfied with the result, then maybe write something about what you liked about the final outcome.
In any case, well written and easy to follow post. And once again, really good animation!