Best way to create a Danland sub-theme that has a slideshow?

I would like to create a Danland sub-theme, rather than modifying the Danland code, so future updates to Danland do not overwrite my customizations. I would like the new sub-theme to include the image slideshow on the front page. It seemed that a quick way to do that would be to modify Danblog and add the slideshow back to it. I figured that the slideshow is removed inside of the Danblog page.tpl.php. So I deleted that, thinking that the Danland page.tpl.php would be used, since that is the base theme. Unfortunately, this results in a page that looks like it has no page formatting, with all the content running down the left side. Is there a better way to create such a sub-theme to be exactly like Danland? Thanks!