Reply To: Turn Off Feature Graphic Echo

One of those images are the Featured Images (top image), and the other image (inside the post content) is the Content image.

You can turn off the Featured Images in the Genesis Settings page under “Content Archives“.

You can also remove the code that adds Featured Images to show above the Content in your functions.php file

// Add featured image above the entry content
add_action( 'genesis_before_entry', 'oasis_featured_photo' );
function oasis_featured_photo() {

    if ( ! ( is_singular() && has_post_thumbnail() ) ) {
        return;
    }

    $image = genesis_get_image( 'format=url&size=single-posts' );

    $thumb_id = get_post_thumbnail_id( get_the_ID() );
    $alt = get_post_meta( $thumb_id, '_wp_attachment_image_alt', true );

    if ( '' == $alt ) {
        $alt = the_title_attribute( 'echo=0' );
    }

    printf( '<div class="featured-image"><img src="%s" alt="%s" class="entry-image"/></div>', esc_url( $image ), $alt );
}

“Also, I can see where to upload background images for the home page, but where do I specify a solid color background? Is it a large graphic, a small tiled graphic or CSS code?”

To do this you would need to add a background color manually in the CSS. You can add it in the style.css file directly, or you can add it in the Customizer CSS page.

“is the first graphic of the Epik demo a static Genesis Slider slide?”

Yes it’s a static image, but you won’t need a Slider to do this since you can just add an image inside a Text Widget and it will show up in the same spot.