I like it very much, but it seems to me that the paper is raising up too much within the water.

i agree, i used the layer effects with bevel and emboss and i had the darker areas a little too dark

A YouTuber called xgeous has a good tutorial on creating water text. It's long, but the results are awesome. I did it once but deleted the image a while ago. Worth checking out and it's good practice for other GIMP features.





Might check some of his other tutorials, he does some cool stuff. The videos are long, but he goes slowly so you can follow along. I've done a few of his tutorials and learned a lot.

Meet The Gimp also has one.
It looks to me like you should set the opacity a little lower for a more transparent look around the white edges Jacob.