What's a good way to have particles grow and shape a surface like below?

Like This

Possibly with animation nodes? I have no idea here.

To me, seems like the emitter is the object and then use a Charge with the particles having a self effect of Force.

But that doesn’t seem right. I guess my goals would be:

  1. Learn how to get objects to stick to an object.
  2. Learn how to get particles to “push” each other out of the way along said surface.
  3. Change particle color over age (probably).