Building a Newspaper Theme

I’m building a newspaper theme and I’m trying to emulate the style used by USA Today – one ‘main’ article with a picture with several articles on the side.

To fill up the ‘main’ article space I’ve been using a normal loop, and within that loop I use an if statement to check if the post has an image. However, this presents a problem when I create my second loop to display the secondary articles on the side, as it is impossible to ‘skip’ over the article displayed just to the left.

Is there a way I could change the first loop so that the second one could skip it over? Or am I doing things totally wrong?

Thanks in advance.