I would like to have the 3 most recents posts at the bottom of the home page. I have created a custom widget area above the footer. How can I get the posts to show up like in the mockup I have attached?

I realize I could probably do it using Juggledad's template, but I need to have the background be full width, hence using the custom widget in the footer.

I would look for a plugin to do this.

I did something like that with either the List Category Posts or the TPG Get Post plugin and set the attributes to show one post in each widget area with offset attributes for posts widget areas 2 and 3. It will take bit of wrapping your head around the code though.