I have experience with photoshop and illustrator but I have never played with water effects. I had to look up how to create a splash effect and I found a site that teaches 30 different water effects for Photoshop. There is a lot of photo manipulation involved and may be difficult to produce successfully. Since this is an experimental project I am going to experiment to see what results I can achieve. Here are some screen shots of the process I am going to use from the tutorial. I hope to achieve something to this effect but with different animal silhouettes.
This process involves collecting  various different images of splashing water and using their form to match the contours of the intended form. This will involve a lot of experimenting and tweaking to get it just right. There are examples of the process that I will be following (taken from the tutorial site):
Here is an image the tutorial worked with. This is just an example of one water splash that will be utilized. In actuality, there will be an array of images to choose from.
In this process, we are removing the background color from the image. This is achieved through finding the color channel with the most contrast between the areas that that we want to be opaque and those we want to be transparent. In this example, the background is blue so it will be the red channel we will be modifying.
In this step, we begin to combine the multiple elements to create an image. In this example, we are replacing the human figure with splashes of water to emphasis movement. In this example shown is still a crude image that needs tweaking and warping to make it fit into the contours of the body. This is the essential process that will be repeated to create the form.
Additionally, different water splash images will be used to accentuate the limbs of the form. I will be utilizing this technique to achieve my experimental project.
Process of ART 