Create Post Archive to look just like Portfolio: add page template for posts

I really like the simplicity of this theme. I just wish the blog page showing posts did more of a visual index or buckets, just like the portfolio page. Is there a way to duplicate this portfolio content to show posts in a bucket/gellery layout, where the respective posts call the featured image and the rollover text is the blog post/title, etc. Otherwise – is the only other way to reduce blogs to a smaller series of indexed summaries to use the <more> tag to limit the full blog text and set ‘reading’ to ‘summaries’? Any help would be a appreciated. I was half hoping it would be easy to duplicate the php content of the content-portfolio.php in the content.php file – but I would surely break stuff while trying.

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