A STREET rages into a wild river, a road melts to the earth's core and a pier falls into an icy crevasse – Edgar Müller did it all.

The "master street painter" has transformed some of the world's most ordinary-looking streets into dramatic landscapes using three-dimensional paintings to create the perfect illusion.

Müller, 40, sent chills down the spines of the people of Laoghaire, in Ireland, when he created a giant crevasse on the town's East Pier.

Dubbed Ice Age, the dramatic frozen chasm took just one day to create as Müller and fellow painters worked from sunrise to sunset during the town's Festival of World Cultures.

"I wanted to play with positives and negatives to encourage people to think twice about everything they see," Müller told the UK's Daily Mail.

"It was a very scary scene, but when people saw it they had great fun playing on it and pretending to fall into the earth."

The artist received similar acclaim at the Prairie Art Festival in Canada when he created Waterfall, a sweeping river scene featuring a wooden raft disappearing into a street in Moose Jaw.

But Edgar Müller's biggest and most impressive project was creating the optical illusion of an apocalyptic volcano in the German town of Geldern.

Müller and his painters worked around cars and shopfronts to produce a Lava – a breath-taking illusion of a road disappearing into the earth's core.

"It gets thrilling when the observer runs into the picture," Müller said.

The artist, who is believed to have been inspired by the British "Pavement Picasso" Julian Beever, once chalked a swimming pool on the street so realistic that shoppers swerved to avoid it.

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