A couple comments:
I would use Swing over AWT, definitely.
If you are creating your GUI by laying out components (and maybe moving them around), use JLabels. You can call setFont and setForeground on them for size and color.
If you are doing animation by customizing the painting (display) of a panel (JPanel), use the setColor method on Graphics2D, as well as a host of other things you could do there.
How you do the animation depends on how complicated your GUI needs to be. Probably, however,
you should control it with a System time-based counter running in a separate
thread that updates your display every X milliseconds.
Bill