Mystique featured post content and thumbnail

I am using Mystique as my theme. In the featured posts area, my first featured post used my thumbnail as the image…but my second featured post did not use the thumbnail, and instead used a small version of the entire image attached to the post. Is there any way to use the post thumbnail image all the time?

Also, the featured posts area uses the beginning of the post as content. Is there any way that I could set it up to use a manual excerpt as the content in this area?

Thank you.