Learning More Animation Basics

While currently working on a new animation that involves live action objects being combined with animation, I've seen that there are still some gaps in my knowledge in terms of the basic principles of animation, mostly the physics behind them and getting the  timing right to make these kinds of animations look close to natural, for that reason I've decided to take a short break from working on this larger animation to work on these short form animations, in hopes that they'll prepare me better to understand how these objects would move.

They could still definitely use some cleaning up and refining, I think that the water one below is something I'd like to attempt again, as I was just trying to replicate an example off of YouTube but using less frames, and obviously less precise than the original was. 

 

The other water animation below is a draft for the larger animation I've been working on, I wanted to see how I could change the speed of the water to make it look as realistic as possible as it falls off of the plant. What was most important was it speeding up as the plant curves down, and the droplet lingering at the tip of the leaf as it is being dragged down by gravity. The actual fall itself is too slow but my goal for this piece was to get the movement of the droplet while on the plant as smooth as possible and I think I've achieved something quite close to what I was going for.