Should you animate before coloring or color before animating?

[Sketchasaurus]

Depending on the complexity of the animation and also the complexity of the final result, this sort of thing is all up to you figuring out how you approach spriting the best. For me, I don't use the same approach for everything; I have multiple methods in approaching animation.

The most important thing to keep in mind about animation in general is that you want your actions to have some believability while also being understandable/"readable" at the native resolution of a sprite.