How to change the color of an object

[Phil Personal Acct]

Hi guys, 

I'm new to Illustrator and it is slowly destorying my will to live. I am trying to change the color of an object. I traced it so that it is now a vector. I then selected it, chose the color picker, picked bright red and selected OK. It came out as a dark grey.

I also selected it and chose "recolor" from the properties panel. Then the only color options i was given were all muted and dark and miserable. I can't find any decent colors anywhere. 

Can anyone help out a serious newbie in distress?

Really sorry for the inanely simple questions. Thanks in advance.

Phil

[Doug A Roberts]

The default tracing preset is black & white, which assigns a greyscale colour to your objects. Open the colour panel (Window > Colour), open the panel menu and choose RGB.

[Ton Frederiks]

Is your current document in CMYK mode?

Can you create a new document based on an Art & Illustration preset and copy your current artwork into it?

[Monika Gause]

Use the color panel to change an object's color. Window > Color

Or if you have a swatch or want to create one, use the swatches panel.

Don't get distracted by the color picker.

Recolor artwork also is not meant for this task

https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/selecting-colors.html