Photoshop. I just shade the letters like anything else. You can covert them to images rather than text, and while you can no longer edit what they say once that's done, you can blur, burn, dodge, stroke, etc them.
Yes...Bean is greatly improving artistically. This is obviously attributed to the fact that he's being a total experience hog and putting all of his points into drawing and writing.
But don't worry, his extremely low armor class and hp mean that we can probably kill him in one hit if need be. So if he betrays us or anything I don't think we have much to worry about.