Putting a label in a specific place

Question

I have a small ImageIcon that I'd like to display in a specific location in a JPanel.
I discovered you can't paint an ImageIcon directly onto a JPanel (or can you???). So I added the ImageIcon to a JLabel, then added that to my JPanel.
OK, that worked. Trouble is, I want to be able to move that label around on the panel -- to be able to set and reset its location based on user input. But I can't find a way to do that. If I try to at least set the location of the JLabel in the upper left-hand corner of the JPanel, I can't even do that. I tried setLocation(), but it doesn't seem to work. I'm guessing that when I call setLocation(), the method is only affecting the placement of the graphic in the JLabel itself, but not the placement of the JLabel in the JPanel.
So do any of you out there have suggestions for how I could do this? I'm wondering if I shouldn't just create a large JLabel that covers the whole panel, and then use setLocation() to move the ImageIcon around on the label, rather than try to move the label around on the panel. Does that sound like a reasonable solution?
The original suggestion was to custom make a paint() method to use on a Canvas, but I really prefer using the Swing JComponents if I can.
Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Here is an example of code that moves a JLabel within a JFrame.
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
import javax.swing.border.*;
public class LabelMover extends JPanel {
    JLabel myLabel;
    /** Creates a new instance of LabelMover */
    public LabelMover() {
     addMouseMotionListener(new MyMouseMotionAdapter2());
     myLabel = new JLabel("this is an example");
     myLabel.setOpaque(true);
     myLabel.setBackground(Color.YELLOW);
     myLabel.setBorder(BorderFactory.createLineBorder(Color.black));
     add(myLabel);
    public class MyMouseMotionAdapter2 extends MouseMotionAdapter {
     public void mouseMoved(MouseEvent e) {
         myLabel.setLocation(e.getX(), e.getY());
    public static void makeGUI() {
     JFrame myFrame = new JFrame();
     myFrame.setBounds(0, 0, 300, 300);
     myFrame.getContentPane().setLayout(null);
     LabelMover myContent = new LabelMover();
     myContent.setOpaque(true);
     myContent.setBackground(Color.WHITE);
     myFrame.setContentPane(myContent);
     myFrame.setVisible(true);
     * @param args the command line arguments
    public static void main(String[] args) {
     javax.swing.SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
         public void run() {
          makeGUI();
}