Mark-making is the general term for any deliberate trace placed on a surface — brush, pen, pencil, finger, knife, stamp, scratch, spray, or digital stylus.
The term is broader than brushwork, since it covers drawing, printmaking, collage cutting, and contemporary practices that mix paint with everything else. Description uses it to talk about the vocabulary of marks a picture is built from: are they all of one kind (a single nib, a single brush) or are several types of mark in play at once (rubbed graphite next to clean ink next to stencilled spray)? A picture’s mark-making sets its tactile register before colour or composition register, since marks announce the means by which the image was made. The phrase is twentieth-century in usage but names something as old as image-making itself.