I’ve already tried playing around with the css and html but all my efforts end up breaking something. Here’s an idea of what I’m trying to achieve below. Any help would be appreciated.
welcome to the forum,
Maybe opening a discussion or issue on repo GitHub - adityatelange/hugo-PaperMod: A fast, clean, responsive Hugo theme. might be worth a try.
Papermod in general is a one column theme, so you are right, you will mostly need to change the layouts and css. to achieve the desired result. Which in turn has to consider all the stuff around.Also keep in mind that a max with for the content is set, so you may have to handle something there, too if the image is large.
PaperMod can work in different modes doing different things for it’s pages. So it’s unclear which of the resulting pages you want to style that way.
Have a look at Requesting Help for more details what we need to help you out.
If you are willing to customize the theme and need assistance, you will have to get in details, best by providing a link to your repo to show and elaborate on
maybe some can point you in a direction.