Design problem

Hi, I planning on writing my own simple 3D engine for learning purposes only. I plan to use OpenGL in order to gain access to the hardware, but I not entirely sure how the process should work. The way I thinking is I would write the code to tranformation, lighting and projection along with frustrum clipping and portal rendering. Then, once a list of visible points have been established I then pass these onto OpenGL to draw along with texture information. Is this the way to do it ? Can I perform these operations and ask OpenGL to draw the triangles and apply textures to them ? Thanks in advance Michael