Newbie LW to ACAD to SolidWorks help

I've been tossed an older 2006 Solidworks lic. at work for a few upcoming projects. I'm really a Lightwave 3D guy and ACAD but quickly warming up to SolidWorks. 3D modelling with snaps and splines! YA!

Finishing tutorial after tutorial but having trouble visualizing the difference between surface/solid modeling aspect.

Examples:

Modeling a VCR is straight forward but how would the front display be handled (LED clock/FF/etc.) Would actually modeling a led display and then modeling a smoked clear glass in front of it work? I'm unsure about the transparency attributed possible with SolidWorks and assigning materials.

With assign materials how would you go about signing different materials to a curved object like a toothbrush handle? If there was a swirl design with different color wrapping around the handle would I need to cut and rebuild the surface?

I don't need to be spoon fed but would very much appreciate a tip or two or perhaps a few urls to send me in the right direction.

Perhaps some good results and I can get the boss to upgrade me to SolidWorks 2010.

Thank you for your time.

See the tutorials in my signature.

A toothbrush as you describe is an overmolded two material "assembly". I would probably do as multi-body solid and push out individual "parts" as needed to make tooling.

Different colors or textures can be applied to the solid bodies within the sldprt file.

Thank you for the quick reply. I'll add those tutorials to my list right away!

My progress is zooming ahead with all the tutorials available but I find the whole parametric modeling concept so different than straight polygon modeling. SolidWorks feature commands are awesome and fairly explanatory.

Mistakenly I have been trying to build projects out of single parts and assigning colors and attributes to separate features etc. As the VCR example above I was trying to assign transparency to extrudes etc... Probably would work but not organized for rendering later. I'm going to go separate parts per attributes for now.

Time to jump all over the tutorials! If you see a "toothbrush" related tutorial explaining spline/curve assignment to attributes please post as I see that sort of operation needed in the future.

Again, thank you (and the forum) for the informative help!