Did you find the answers to this? It's really as simple as searching all the available themes for WP and finding a layout you like, then editing the theme to your liking. (Most of this is done by simply creating your own image files to replace the ones that come with the theme.)

For instance, this is an example of a theme I tried on a blog of mine: click here

I didn't like the colors much, so this is the exact same theme, but with some tweaking: click here