I've undertaken the task of writing my own text based RPG with python. Just a random idea I had. It's mainly just a personal project for the fun of it. It's going to be largely text based for now and I'll add a gui later on. For right now the only gui it will have is conversation dialogues, menus and shop windows. Anyway, I can't find it in my book but is there a way to insert pre-existing images into a graphical window? Well that's kind of dum I know there is a way but can somebody tell me how to go about it? It'd be kind of neat if I could like draw an image of a shopkeeper and insert it in the graphical window next to or behind the text. Or an image of the person you are presently speaking to next to the dialogue of what they're saying.

Screenie of a test run of what I managed to get done just last night

This is not a direct answer to your question, more like a hint: I don't know if you know this already, but there's an extension to python called pygame. It wraps the SDL libraries and it was made exactly for that: Game programming. I think this tool would make your life much, much easier. If you later need to add a background music or something to your game, pygame will handle all this. Take a look:

www.pygame.org

Drawing an image with pygame is really simple as well ^_^. To enter fullscreen mode (which you may want to use on your game) is also piece of cake

Regards!