I think your trim scheme looks sharp, but as I said earlier you'll have an easier to see plane if you'll go mostly yellow with black stripes and do only the bottom black if you want to. A black plane turns to a shadow pretty quickly, while yellow is the easiest color there is to see against a blue or overcast sky (that is and see enough airframe detail to keep orientation). You can lay the black covering right over the yellow, but as mentioned before you'll have to put the yellow stripes down on the black area and then overlap the black over them to make it look right.

On the pushrods, while it's 100% true that carbon rods work well, I think they are overkill on a trainer. A good stiff wood pushrod will work fine as will any of the rod in a tube setups.