Hey...congrats on finishing your first model...whenever you render something..make sure you create a light....to illuminate the scene and the colors will come out better....if you still want to get rid of the black background....just create a material from the hypershade and apply it to a plane or something and put it as a backdrop to your model (or one cool thing you could do is create a sphere....scale it extremely big so that you can see inside of it....make sure your model is in the sphere...then make the sphere a color that you want......you get a nice background effect)....
as for getting really nice coloring on your modeling....it can be fairly complicated.........you could create another material and try finding a color that suits.......if you still don't like the results....you could map out the uvs and import them into photoshop and create your own textures...but this is getting pretty complicated...I recommend just sticking with the regular colors fills for now...until you can get your hand on some tutorials or books or classes that go more in depth with texturing/rendering..because it is really a "whole new world"..lol....anywho...hopefully that helped....let me know if there are any other problems...good luck
TheAnswerRP03
PS-I don't know if you were interested in rendering in wireframe..but that is done the the hardware render...and there have been quite a few posts in the past.....it's not too difficult to do