What's your Plein Air kit is like?

[AtomicRunner]

I considered charcoal, but in my experience it's a bit of a mess to carry around. Also keeping the art from not smudging is a bit hard, at least for me. Which is a pity, because I do enjoy drawing with it. I've tried the charcoal oil pencils Cretacolor makes (the Nero line) and they are quite good and solve some of those problems. Sadly they don't have the same smudging quality. They do have them also in Sanguine and White (and the white pencil is quite good and opaque to ad some white highlights in mixed media) so now that you mention charcoal, I may take a set of the three colors for a spin.

[amos]

Charcoal, pastel etc. all smudge real bad in a sketchbook which makes it a really non-portable medium for me. Fortunately I have access to really good coloured pencil options so I usually just grab those if I'm in a dry media mood. There's also watercolour pencils for versatility! Though, tbh, if I'm drawing I'm probably focusing on value rather than colour anyway, so realistically my dry media "kit" is just a 0.5mm mechanical pencil and a 2.0mm lead holder and an eraser.

[nullnug]

Depends on the type of charcoal from my experience. I prefer compressed charcoal over vine. If you just mean the material getting on the other page, I've had that happen with graphite too. Usually depends more on if I'm applying too much. But I also have a very loose outlook on permanence. I'm fine with stuff in sketchbooks not being pristine. I had lots of colleague and classmates who embraced the experimentation side of sketchbooks to the point you wouldn't recognize they were books by the time they were finished. So I see a limit to being too careful with them. But that's just me. Charcoal, paint pen, and graphite sticks are all I use these days.

[amos]

IME graphite smudges on the other side a little bit, especially as you keep drawing in it (I sometimes stick a piece of paper in between the last two pages if I want to minimize this a little), but some pressed charcoal seems to smudge both across the page and on its own page just from handling the book. I don't really consider myself super precious about my sketchbooks, especially if it's like big ringbound pad for life drawing or something, but most of the time that level of smudging just makes me prefer loose sheets instead.

[nullnug]

Yeah if you're particularly worried about it, wax paper and tracing paper are both good for contact.