opusprime

Ok, I got it.

You can take the Graphics object from a second BufferedImage and draw
to it. My mistake appears to have been in drawing my second
BufferedImage, I was using the Graphics2D class to draw on my
BufferedImage, but I was adding the image to my background using the
regular Graphics class. Once I switch this to draw to the Graphics2D
object, it painted correctly.

g.drawImage(bimg, 0, 0, this);

switched to

g2.drawImage(bimg, 0, 0, this);