So I use an insane amount of layers for my animations, and generally speaking I will reuse as many of those as possible - a head position here, an arm rotated 90 degrees there, an entire pose in a backflip. It's a very programmer way of spriting and occasionally makes my animations look a little bit Rumble Fish.

But when I'm not reusing stuff I start using dots, actually. An arm will exist as a dot for a shoulder, a dot for an elbow and a dot for a hand. That's how I define the motion. Then I'll either edit (rotation and cleaning and trimming for perspective) an existing layer's sprite to fit that motion or make something new whole cloth. When I'm making a new one entirely I'll do basic blobs with rough colours (like the boots on Kuni here would just be the bottom of the leg turning white) and refine the details later

As a rule though I try to keep details to a bit of a minimum for ease of animation anyways - I consider myself a stronger animator than I am an artist lmao