I have tried tutorials on this but I still don't quite understand it. Basically my question is which method is better and why? Should I use paint or paintComponent?
Please try to keep the answer simple, thanks.
Quoting from documentation of paint() method
This method actually delegates the work of painting to three protected methods: paintComponent, paintBorder, and paintChildren. ... A subclass that just wants to specialize the UI (look and feel) delegate's paint method should just override paintComponent.
It looks like the paint() method actually draws the component, including the border and children. If you only want to customize the component's appearance excluding the border and children, you use paintComponent().
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/javax/swing/JComponent.html#paint(java.awt.Graphics)
Generally speaking, when painting in Swing, it is recommended to override paintComponent.
There are a number of reasons why, one is paintComponent is painted at the bottom layer, meaning you won't accidentally wiping out any components that were rendered during the paint process - this happens a lot to people who post here.
There are a, very, few times you might need to override paint, but I would always encourage you to try making it work with paintComponent first.
Check out
- Performing custom painting
- Painting in AWT and Swing (+1 to trashgod)
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15103553/difference-between-paint-and-paintcomponent