It is very easy to add a shadowy effect to drawn text in Java. All we have to do is to pick a darker color for the shadow and draw it near the center of the original text that we want to shadow. The code snippet below does just that on the drawing context of a JLabel.
Graphics g = JLabel1.getGraphics(); g.setColor(new Color(120, 120, 120)); int x = 20; int y = 20; int fontSize = 22; Font font = new Font("ariel", Font.BOLD, fontSize); g.setFont(font); g.drawString("Shadow", x+2, y+2); g.setColor(new Color(220, 220, 220)); g.drawString("Shadow", x, y);