Adding recent comments to voice “bubbles” on front page

Hi-

I’m trying to build a custom wordpress portfolio theme that has the three most recent comments posted inside voice bubbles on the home page. These recent-most comments will be “pulled” from any number of artworks that have their own page (and obviously comments below the images). I guess you could conceive of each artwork as a blog post so to speak.

Here’s the dilemma:

Aside from not knowing about how to go about doing this in WP, I’m having some difficulty in the early stages of markup. I understand that it is good practice to build a mock successfully in html/css before moving over to implementing it on top of WP. It was my intent to have a 3 column div container where each column would have the bubble graphic as its background. For some reason, I can’t get this work. Any help on either concern would be greatly appreciated.

Here’s a LINK to a page for the effect I am trying to capture.

Thanks!