How to colour a group of objects with transparent circles?

Question

A colleague has asked me to change her sloppy pixel-based logo design into a vector. Now, I'm a long-time photoshop user who's just getting started with Illustrator. So naturally... I'm all confused :D.

This is the design:

And this has been my approach so far:

So, I hope these pictures already show where I get stuck... I want the whites in the logo to be transparent. Reasoning with my PS-knowledge, I tried to make a mask of the flower so that it is filled with the transparent circles but still remains transparent in between the 'petals'. But! Apparently, Illustrator can't mask grouped objects by grouped objects ':D and know I'm lost!

It would be great if somebody could help me (and my colleague) out!

PS: after taking the screenshot I realised that the outer grey circle should be the top layer instead of the bottom layer, so I already changed that ;)

Answer 1

You have to make a clipping mask.

1- Make sure the white flower is the top object.

2- Select the white flower and make it a compound path using ctrl + 8 .

3- Now select everything (but not the circle) and make the clipping path using ctrl + 7 .

The clipping path only works with paths and compound paths as masks.