Creating static homepage and recent posts

how do I also display recent posts below my homepage text?

By creating a custom page template for your front page that includes a secondary Loop.

would this require knowledge of php/css etc to do?

Yes. Not so much the custom template but the secondary Loop. That can get a bit complicated if you’re not comfortable with PHP coding.

The CSS is going to be completely dependant upon your theme, so I very much doubt that you’ll find a tutorial on that. There some example of secondary Loop coding on http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_posts