I used water splash brushes that i downloaded long time ago... see SBS

What is the Water Elemental? Please check my WIP section (SBS) to find out more about that creature.

Techniques I've been used are matte painting inside Photoshop, clipping masks, brush with custom brushes (links), puppet warp, also brush inside SAI, and finally adjustments layers with some filters (blur, motion blur, gaussian blur) back into Photoshop.

Hope you like my creation, lots of great entries, I'm afraid I'm no match with the others.

(•̪ . •̪) ~ Thanks!

Edit: link has been updated.

I decided to put this guy somewhere more dynamic and colorful! Hope you like it :)

distortion and liquify filter for the bird, difference clouds and zigzag distortion for the water and some masking and varying blend modes

This took pretty much all weekend. A LOT of hours, but the further I got into it the more I was liking it, so I just kept going and going! Finding new places that I thought there needed to be feathers and so on. It was a ton of fun to make, hope you all enjoy it :)