Sapient alien concept sketches

Concept sketches, from June to just now, of the Tikao.

It was first created by me two years ago, as a feathered, tailed humanesque creature. In the case of the (unrelated) Tawitea, I need a humanesque look for story purposes, but the Tikao had no need to look pretty to human eyes, so I wanted to change them.

I based the early sketches from this summer on lemurs, as my idea of how they started walking upright, came from the dancing of the Sifaka lemurs. (Of course they would not need to look just like lemurs just because they started dancing/running like them, but I liked the look of the lemurs.)

The first head sketch was originally a Sifaka lemur skull, where I shortened the snout and increased the size of the brain case, similar to the differences between humans and chimps. (The Tikao would of course not be related to our lemurs as they are from a different planet, but they were supposed to be descended from lemur-like creatures.)

The second picture (from above, the black/white one) was the same thing, except here I did it with a Ruffed lemur skull instead of a Sifaka. Shortened the nose, increased brain size.
The colored face was based on a Sifaka lemur.

The fourth sketch, to the bottom left, was the Ruffed lemur-version, full body. I left it at that, but thought they were too Earthlike and wanted to change them somehow.

The second full-body sketch to the right was made a few weeks ago, and here I obviously made them hexapods, something that has given me huge problems with the evolutionary tree and has forced me to change huge parts of it. But I like it this way.

But it is just a concept sketch, details will probably change.
Then the heads sketched in the top right corner are the most recent. It has a parted lower jaw, so really three jaws, and each jaw has an extra "joint", two in the case of the upper jaw here, that's what forms that "inverted Y-shape".

(This has later been redesigned because I didn't want to change the rest of the fauna in the same way - they still have the same face and "mandibles", but they just don't have the three jaws, just two.)

Four nostrils, four eyes, no colors here obviously but they are really very colorful and "flashy", since they belong to a group of creatures that are far more color- and sight driven than us terran mammals, more like our birds.

They can't talk like us (that idea I had long ago, when they still had humanlike faces), but they can learn to understand our language, and we can, with time and practice, understand theirs.

Many (most in speculative evolution) would still consider them far too human-looking, but I made them this way because partly, there are only two (or three) ways for an intelligent animal to be walking on two legs, and that's like us, like birds or theropods, or, the third way, like the "dug" in Star Wars (meaning, walking on the front limbs, using the hind ones for handling objects).

And I like the idea to have a humanoid - meaning upright-walking - creature that doesn't look or function like a "rubber forehead alien", meaning, what could be essentially a human with just a bit of make-up.