First, sorry for my English.

Requirements:
Gimp
Glass filter:
https://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&sect ... mp#/di1sio



1 - Make your design what will be the colored sand. Use a hard edged brush and try not to leave spaces of the background color (or transparent).
2 - Use the IWarp filter to make waves (Filters-Distorts). Then to emulate the effect of the sand use the RGB Noise (Filters-RGB Noise). In that filter uncheck "independent RGB". After that, desaturate the color to avoid bright colors (Colors-Hue Saturation).
3 - On a new transparent layer draw the outline of a bottle using a hard-edged brush (or "Stroke Selection" if you wish) with a size of 5 to 15 pixels.



4 - In the bottle layer select the external area of the bottle with "Fuzzy Select Tool". Grow selection with size in pixels used to draw the contour of the bottle (Select-Grow). Then select the layer of sand and clear the selection.
5 - Now we emulate the effect of glass in the shape of the bottle. For that use Glass filter on contour bottle layer (Filters-Kward1979uj-Glass). After applying the filter, remove the layer of the shadow that the filter generates. You can play with the opacity of that layer, and even give it color from Color-Colorize.
6 - In a new transparent layer you make a design or drawing and apply the same steps described in step 2 to emulate the sand.
7 - To emulate the distortion created by the glass, apply a very small lens distortion "apply lens" of amount of 1.1 (Filters-Distorts-Apply Lens) in the design or drawing layer.
8.9 - In this step we emulate the glow of light in the bottle. Make a white shapes as shown in 8. Then apply a very high value of Gaussian Blur (Filter-Blur-Gaussian Blur).
10 - Complete the design. Add a cap to the bottle. Make glare, perspective shadows, etc..

I am a very bad artist (Rather, I am not an artist). I'm sure you can make better designs that seem much more to excellent real models, like this:

That is very nice YAFU, I must give that a try. thanks for sharing.

Very clever, YAFU.

The bottle image O found works great for this effect.
That is a clever idea!
Always something new to try in Gimp.



I would attach the xcf but its too big.

Just use the bottle image and set the colorization to more of a clear bottle look.
Then run plasma for colored sand - run spread on that at a low value (1 or 2)
Next select the bottle (make sure you rendered it out first), and select invert.
Select the colored plasma layer select edit>clear
Now set the layer mode to overlay for the plasma layer on top.
Erase the top of the sand and show just the top of the bottle.

Mines kinda messy, and not done real well but you get the idea.
This just makes it look a bit more realistic.I think i might try to do one with a flag in it...great project!

Here's my fake try; used Kward's Glass Script-fu to get the glass bott outline.

Good works! I'm glad you had fun.

@Oregonian, Is that all real or gimped?

The glass canister is one I found on the internet and cleaned up in GIMP. The sand, I did in GIMP.

oh, that way colored sand looks very real!

That 1 gallon container works excellent O!

Glad it works for you Rod. I love glass and glass things. I have a lot of them that I've collected and fixed them to use for GIMP stuff. I also have a lot of glass objects in my home. Glass things catch my eye faster than anything else.

Here are a couple pretty ones. What I do is clean out the background around them (usually white), then after that is done I select the bottle with the paths tool, and take it to Color to Alpha to clear out the white that's part of the bottle. That makes the bottle "see-through."



XCF file of bottles attached below.

Found a jar.

Good design Oregonian! Very realistic.
I also I was having fun and I've used your glass jar :


For the crack of glass I had used a cracks brush from deviantART first, but I did not like the result. Then in a new layer I draw the crack with the brush, and then apply the filter "glass" from "kward1979uk" with minimal shadow. I like the result!

Very nice, I like the broken glass effect.

I like it YAFU, The broken glass effect is cool.

These aren't very large but they are interesting looking. I've attached the png file.

Ok, offtopic (no sand here). Swimming in a bottle: