Ok, so I have this strange tendency to answer my own questions shortly after I post them, but I really needed that image, so I figured out how to alleviate the symptom.

I think my last post still showed some kind of rendering bug.

The reason why I have the crazy shapes at the edge of the drawing is because when you export the drawing, it cuts things off where it sees that the edge should be, ignoring the blur.  This should be fixed.

An auto shadow/glow tool would be fun too.

Perhaps I should go file some bugs.

-Brian