Leigh Took is a British visual effects artist, matte painter, and miniatures supervisor known for traditional oil-on-glass matte painting and practical miniature effects across a career spanning more than four decades in film and television. He began his career in 1978 at Pinewood Studios, starting as an apprentice in the matte department under mentor Cliff Culley, where he spent a decade immersed in traditional matte painting techniques standard at the time, progressing from basic tasks to full glass shots for projects such as Warlords of Atlantis (1978), Octopussy (1983) and Reilly: Ace of Spies (1983). Later Leigh worked as a freelance artist on Baron Munchausen (1988), with Derek Meddings on Batman (1989) and Neverending Story 2 (1990) and on Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991) and Faraway, So Close! (1993).
These traditional matte painting techniques involved detailed hand-painting of scenes directly onto large sheets of glass to create illusions of environments, landscapes, or architectural extensions. This approach relied on optical compositing methods to integrate painted elements with live-action footage.
Today Leigh is recognised as one of the few active professionals applying traditional matte painting methods in contemporary projects. His mattes are either hand-painted on glass for in-camera shooting, or hand-painted on opaque surfaces for post-production digital compositing.
Recent applications include traditional matte paintings composited digitally for sequences in recent films The Testament of Ann Lee (2026) and The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021), and in-camera glass shots for Operation Fortitude (upcoming) and promotional film League of Legends:’Wild Rift’ (2022).

In the early 1990s, he established Mattes & Miniatures Visual Effects Ltd., a facility based at Bray Studios for 25 years dedicated to practical effects including traditional matte painting, model making and miniature construction. Through his company, Took has supervised miniatures and effects for major productions such as The Da Vinci Code (2006), The Wolfman (2010), Dark Shadows (2012), House of the Dragon (2022), and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), maintaining a preference for in-camera methods as digital workflows became dominant. The company now based in Holyport, Maidenhead thrives thanks to recent surges in interest in analogue/digital hybrid approaches, and maintains a dedicated matte studio alongside model and special effects workshops.