HOW TO GET TEXTURES DONE WITHIN AN HOUR

Here's a texture hack that works for characters with flat/toon shaders - I'm using it on all the characters in this upcoming game.

Block out colors via swatches in perfect squares on an image texture - as long as you don't "filter" the image you can shrink this image down to pixel-art levels of small; which in turn decreases load times for games. Just make the face a separate image texture so that can be a few hundred pixels reserved for that important detail.

In the case with the stripes - only diagonally drawn lines will appear pixelated on the model. Also, as long as the UV islands are wrapped as squares/rectangles you won't get any smearing.

This trick falls apart when you're using photorealistic rendering. If you want the characters too not look like vinyl toys, you need to add a bump map / normal map detail. To do that, you need to properly unwrap all your UV islands, cause UV islands can't be jumbled, overlapping and occupying the same spaces like you can get away with for the swatch technique.