Capturing the apperance of a component before it gets visible and laid out

Question

Basically, I'm trying to make components fade in. My strategy is to create a BufferedImage instance, and have the component paint on this image (aComponent.paint(img.getGraphics()). When I have the BufferImage, I can easily use Java2D to make the image fade in, by blending it with the background. When the image is fully shown, I simply show the real component instead of the faux image.
This all works fine, if the component has already been shown, and I want to capture an image of the component and fade it out. The problem is, when the component has never been shown (and been laid out by the layout manager), all I get is a gray image. I have been trying various things, like calling aComponent.doLayout(), and then I usually do get a few of the sub-components painted (that in turn make up the component I'm referring to), but not all of them, and the layout seems wrong. For example, a left-aligned text field (again, part of the component I'm trying to fade in) might appear as it should, whereas a layout-sensitive component such as a JEditorPane will not have gotten its proper size, and other sub-components still will not even be present.
Are there are Swing gurus present that can help me sort this out?

Answer 1

Thanks for all your suggestions. Actually, I'm not only trying to fade the component in, I'm also rolling it up and down. The code I'm working with is based on Fr�d�ric Lavigne Apache-licensed JTaskPane (http://common.l2fprod.com/), which supports expanding and contracting an image of a component.
Basically, the way JTaskPane works (and more specifically, the JCollapsiblePane it uses), is that an image is taken of the component when JTaskPane is initialized. This all works fine when the JTaskPane is initially expanded (that is, the real component is shown), but my application requires that initially, the component is not shown. I have attempted to patch Fr�d�ric Lavigne's code so that the image is taken right before it is to be shown, but I still only get a gray image.
I have had limited success using SwingUtilities.invokeLater() -- but my component is not fully laid out even when I capture the image in the run() method of the object instance I pass to invokeLater() (specifically, the JEditorPane that is placed on my component, is not yet laid out, but the JTextFields are). Curiously enough, if I use a javax.swing.Timer, I manage to capture the fully laid out image just fine, but I would prefer using a more elegant solution.
All suggestions are most appreciated.