Any time you start to play with a new 3D graphics package, or come
back to one after a while, you might end up with the dreaded "black
screen".  You know that you drew something there, but it doesn't show
up. 

This has happened to me often enough that I have developed a standard
way to try to solve the problem.  I draw each of the X, Y, and Z axes
as cylinders, put a marker on the positive side of each (so I know
which direction is up and which is down) and put markers at regular
intervals along those axes.   

This does several things - it provides me with a set of visual cues
that I can use to figure out where things are, it gives me a chance to
build the simple primitives used in the system (cylinders, colors and
so on), and it gives me a framework on which I can build bigger and
more complex images over time. 

Here is a python program that generates exactly this.  The three axes
are cylinders and each is a different color.  At the positive end of
each axis (and pointing toward the positive direction) is a cone of
that color.  And at regular intervals along the axis are squares
perpendicular to the axis and of the same color.  

Why a program?  Because I'd get very bored trying to do (as the
program does) 60 squares.  And being bored, I'd make mistakes. Because
by using a program I can change the size of the squares, the interval
between them and other factors far more quickly than if I need to do
it by hand.

To run this and put the pov file in "output.pov" : 
   python genplanes.py output.pov 

Then :
   povray output.pov