Creating shape outlines on illustrator for ipad

[Art_mouth]

Hello everyone. I have been using illustrator for less than a year and for about 2 months on ipad. I am pretty new but. I am struggling to find answers on how to create a simple stroke outline of text like the picture attached. I have tried so far making duplicates of my text and and playing with stroke thickness and stacking them but it's not looking quite like my reference picture. IAM trying to do EXACTLY the effect circled on the picture attached. Please let me know how I can achieve this step by step on AI for ipad it would be very appreciated. I have been searching for a while but can't find any clear iPad instructions. Thank you 

[Laura Coyle. · Accepted solution]

There is no simple way to do this on the iPad without drawing the line by hand You could use the Pencil tool or Pen tool for this.  

On the desktop version, there is not an effect that does exactly what you want, but you would probably need to outline/expand the text first. Select text and choose Type > Create Outlines. Then, you could take the outlined text and choose Object > Path > Offset Path to create a larger shape around the letters. You would then merge those larger shapes together and do further editing - so it's not a perfect solution on the desktop, but it's more workable there than on the iPad, where there is no Offset Path feature.

On the iPad, to expand type (turn it into shapes, vector outlines) select the type and in the Type menu, choose Outline Text