For the wave motion, moving your (control) points along circular paths may be a good starting point. Check out - https://observablehq.com/@mbostock/wave-motion for the general idea, and - https://observablehq.com/@mcmcclur/water-waves for a parameterized example of a water surface.

Imo the difficult part with water droplets is to emulate the surface tension. This slomo video of a falling water drop might provide a good reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4MUTij8f6I

And here is a reference for paint drops: https://youtu.be/5WKU7gG_ApU?t=211

wow thank you these are so helpful! <3

You're very welcome, I'm eager to see what you'll come up with! :) I almost forgot: You can also look into the animation style "liquid motion", and draw inspiration from the stylistic abstractions that others have employed, e.g. https://vimeo.com/108918833

Love this! I've wanted to do something similar for a while. I had made this notebook which was a first foray into it. One thing I thought worked well was using "gooey effects" to create smooth transitions. Might be worth checking out! https://observablehq.com/@pstuffa/drip https://css-tricks.com/gooey-effect/

these are super cool <3 I avoided the gooey-effect for performance considerations but maybe I'll come back to it!