A method to animate water in Chinese painting is presented in this paper. This approach first detects positions of water forms in the hand drawn Chinese painting and synthesizes those forms using autoregressive model. Next, water forms are rendered using an image based rendering technique to produce water forms with the look of Chinese painting. Finally, water forms are animated in hand drawn environments thus the authors bring water forms in Chinese painting to life. The given examples demonstrate the capability of our method to capture the statistic properties associated with the sample data and to produce a variety of water forms for non-photorealistic animation.